Re: Floating point numbers locale bug?

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

On 26-Jan-07, at 2:33 AM, Glenn Maynard wrote:

> This is really an effect of C's awful localization API--there should be
> a way to get a handle to a locale set, and alternate functions for
> sscanf, printf, strtod, etc. that take a handle as an additional 
> parameter.

That is just so true. It's astoundingly bad design. The extra parameter 
would make life so much easier.

> > I don't think that setting the numeric locale is a good idea in
> > general. But Lua's parser still works. It has an explicit
> > workaround for parsing floating-point numbers in non-standard
> > locales.
>
> The behavior is perhaps unexpected and poorly thought out, from
> an API standpoint, but it is not, as far as I know, nonstandard.

I think by "non-standard" he meant "other than the C locale" as opposed 
to "not conforming to the standards".

In the case of the numeric locale, Lua buries the ugly hack inside its 
own lexer, which seems appropriate. But changing locales can also 
change the definitions of character classes, which can also affect the 
lexer (as well as pattern matching inside user programs).