Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it> wrote:
> On my experience, however, the current practice of having one
"monetary
> settings" record for each locale is completely broken. This practice
assumes
> that, e.g., Italians only need amounts in liras or euros. But it is
clear
> that foreign currencies are needed in many instances, so there also is
an
> Italian way of formatting US dollars or Japanese yen.
This goes double for the practice of assuming only one legal date format
for each locale. It's really laughable to read, for example, that the
U.S. ONLY uses m/d/yy. I know lots of Americans who use m-d-yy or
m-d-yyyy, and I use yyyy-mm-dd without confusing too many people.
Kano lists dd/mm/yy for English-speaking Canada, which I know not to be
true for many English-speaking Canadians.
Likewise "negative currency amounts." This is almost exclusively the
professional domain of accountants and bookkeepers -- nobody would write
"I won ($200) in Vegas last week" to indicate a loss -- and they follow
the conventions set by their industry or company, not necessarily their
country.
Locale systems that force you to pick one immutable set of conventions
for a given country are broken in general. I remember having to tell
MS-DOS that I was in South Africa or someplace, just to get my directory
listing the way I wanted it. *nix systems that start with "fr_FR" and
then allow you to define "fr_FR-EURO" or something really aren't much
better; what if I want to deviate from the pre-defined locale in four or
five ways instead of just one?
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Mar 01 2002 - 11:55:58 EST