Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld@dkuug.dk> wrote:
>> 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?
>
> You have to pick one, Doug. You cannot write
> "On the 3/1/02 2002-03-01 1/3/02 1/3/2002 1.3.2002 I went to..."
> Or you can write it but weiting the same date in 5 different
> formats in the same line is not customary and superflous.
That's not what I meant, of course. I meant, what if I want to use the
en_US locale (e.g. to make sure a spelling checker uses the right
dictionary), *but* I also want to use:
- UTF-8 instead of ISO 8859-1, and
- yyyy-mm-dd instead of m/d/yy, and
- 24-hour time (with seconds) instead of 12-hour, and
- some "negative money" format different from the default, and
- have the week start on Monday instead of Sunday
(I don't know if this last one is part of the *nix locale model)
Several people responded that I can go root and define my own private
locale, with whatever settings I like. That's just what I would want to
do, so the problem would be solved, but then I'm not really sure why I
would need to give the new locale a name, since it's not interoperable.
But this is all very OT and I'd better stop now, because I know how
quickly this discussion can devolve into Operating System Wars.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Mar 02 2002 - 13:29:44 EST