Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>There are two wrong design assumption in the "monetary settings":
>
> 1) The <number of decimals> should not be part of the locale at all. >The fact that US dollars need two decimals does not depend on local
> convention of any country, but on the fact that there are coins as small
> as 1/100 of a dollar. There should be a locale-independent list of
> currencies that specifies this parameter (and other things, perhaps)-
> 2) The <currency symbol> is to be part of the locale, but each locale
>
>should have an *array* of currency symbols, with an entry for each existing
> currency. Having a single <currency symbol> per locale would be like
> having one single <month name>!
In Windows XP, the Regional and Language Options Control panel has much of this design. There is a list of currencies per locale. The default is the Euro for the countries in the Euro zone, but the previous currency symbol is available from the list. Moreover, as with most Windows locale values, the user can enter their own default value by typing it into the field. You can change the symbol to 'DEM' or whatever you want.
During development, we considered tying the number of decimals to the currency rather than the user. However we found it caused too many problems for existing applications, which assumed that there was only one setting in effect at a time. In .NET, the two values are grouped together in the RegionInfo class.
John McConnell
Windows Globalization Infrastructure Design & Development
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