A few questions about i18n (and calc issues)

Alexander McLeay alexander at thecartographers.net
Sat Mar 24 00:44:42 CET 2007


On Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:41:18 +0100, Peter Trapp wrote:

> From: Rodolphe Ortalo <rodolphe.ortalo at free.fr>
>> Finally, a more specific question wrt the calculator: does everyone
>> expect numbers to be fully formatted according to the locale for the
>> basic calculator display?
>> This question may sound strange to you, 

Very! I can’t think of any reason why you *wouldn’t* want to localise a
piece of software! Everyone thinks their own system is superior because
it’s logical/unambiguous/traditional/‘universal’, so of *course* we need 
to support what the user wants. (I could say the space-dot method has all
the advantages of a thousands sep, but is unambiguous wrt dot/comma. But I
won’t; it’s just what I’m used to.)

>but it happens that I am french
>> and, in french, we usually do not insert any space or sign between 10^3
>> intervals so no locale and the french locale is pretty similar (i18n
>> reduces to the '.' vs ',' decimal point substitution for FR). So would
>> you expect something like this for the (basic) calculator result
>> display:

(list modified to be more complete)

   12,345.67809       English
   12 345,678 09      ISO (option 1)
   12 345.678 09      ISO (option 2)
   12'345,67809       Swiss
   12.345,67809       German
    12345,67809       French
   1,2345.67809       Asia
 
> If there's no '10^3' sign I won't even care about '.' and ',' as decimal
> point :) So from my side deciding between '.' and ',' will be nice but
> no more effort for '10^3' is needed. I also checked a couple of devices,
> all of them are w/o '10^3'.

I find numbers larger than about 10 000 completely unreadable without
thousands separators. And I’m uncomfortable with the German style. So yes,
I would think anything should support localised decimal points/thousands
seps, and ensure that they adapt to the users settings! (Most operating
systems default to comma for thousands sep here in Australia, but the
recommended/official method, which I prefer, is a space.)




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