On 2002.06.11 14:00 Helgi Örn wrote:
On Tue, 2002-06-11 at 19:42, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote: > > Wouldn't "C" be a more appropriate default locale for non-US users? > > > > sure, but you are assuming competency in coders (-: C should work by default > without editing or enabling anything . Could you guys explain for a non-programmer what this is about?
I'll give her a try...Different parts of the world have slightly different conventions for representing for various types of data. As an example, take the date 04/01/2002. To a brit, this is January 4th, 2002. To an american, it is April 1st, 2002. The POSIX standard has codified all these different conventions into something referred to as a 'locale'. It covers things like date/time display, collation, capitalization, etc.
The POSIX standard also provides a default locale, referred to as the 'C locale'. It is very similiar to en_US, but with some important differences. For example, when sorting in the EN_us locale, values are sorted alphebetically, so that a word beginning with 'A' precedes a word beginning with 'Z', regardless of case. In the C locale, Zed precedes aleph because the character 'Z' precedes 'a' in the ASCII encoding (this is sometimes referred to as 'ascii-betical order').
As a matter of good programming practice (following the principal of least astonishment), if a locale is specified, that locale should be used. If no locale is specified, or if the specified locale is not supported by the C library (see man 3 setlocale), then the program should fallback to the C locale. Apparently, in the case of the application that triggered this thread, that last step wasn't followed.
So, clear as mud? ;) Blessa, Ian --To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org