Group separator migration from U+00A0 to U+202F

For people monitoring this list but not CLDR-users:

To be cost-effective, the migration from the wrong U+00A0 to the correct U+202F as group separator
should be synched across all locales using space instead of comma or period. SI is international and
specifies narrow fixed-width no-break space as mandatory in the role of a numbers group separator.

That is the place to remember that Unicode would have had such a narrow fixed-width no-break space
from its very beginning on, if U+2008 PUNCTUATION SPACE had beed treated equally like its relative,
U+2007 FIGURE SPACE, both being designed for legacy-style hard-typeset tabular numbers representation.
We can only ask why it was not, without any hope of ever getting an authorized response on this list (see
a recent thread about non-responsiveness; subscribers knowing the facts are here but don’t post anymore).

So this is definitely not the place to vent about that misdesign, but it is about the way of fixing it now.
After having painstakingly catched up support of some narrow fixed-width no-break space (U+202F).
the industry is now ready to migrate from U+00A0 to U+202F. Doing it in a single rush is way more
cost-effective than migrating one locale this time, another locale next time, a handful locales the time
after, possibly splitting them up in sublocales with different migration schedules. I really believed that
now Unicode proves ready to adopt the real group separator in French, all relevant locales would be
consistently pushed for correcting that value in release 34. The v34 alpha overview makes clear they
are not.

http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-34#TOC-Migration

I aimed at correcting an error in CLDR, not at making French stand out. Having many locales and
sublocales stick with the wrong value makes no sense any more.

https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/34/by_type/numbers.symbols.html#a1ef41eaeb6982d

The only effect is implementers skipping migration for fr-FR while waiting for the others to catch up,
then doing it for all at once.

There seems to be a misunderstanding: The *locale setting* is whether to use period, comma, space,
apostrophe, U+066C ARABIC THOUSANDS SEPARATOR, or another graphic.
Whether "space" is NO-BREAK SPACE or NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE is **not a locale setting**,
but it’s all about Unicode *design* and Unicode *implementation.*
I really thought that that was clear and that there’s no need to heavily insist on the ST "French" forum.
When referring to the "French thousands separator" I only meant that unlike comma- or period-using
locales, the French locale uses space and that the group separator space should be the correct one.
That did **not** mean that French should use *another* space than the other locales using space.

https://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/11423

Regards,

Marcel
Received on Mon Sep 17 2018 - 14:50:30 CDT