From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue May 11 2004 - 22:33:15 CDT
Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
> From past comments I read here, it is understood now that locale
> identifiers used to select languages contain a country/territory code
> only as a legacy way to select language variants. This code is meant
> to designate the language variant as spoken in that area, but not for
> identifying a location.
IMHO this is at, or at least near, the heart of much of the confusion
surrounding locales and the use of language/country pairs to denote
them.
The issue of "French as spoken in Switzerland" versus "French as spoken
in Canada" is totally unrelated to the issue of Swiss conventions versus
Canadian conventions for sorting, date and time format, decimal
separator, and so forth.
As for time zones, I agree completely with Mark that they should be
handled separately from all other locale settings, and not dependent on
them in any way. Not only do people travel, and need to change their
time zone setting while leaving everything else alone, but states and
countries do sometimes change from one time zone to another. The Olson
data shows how common that is.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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