Re: perror, gettext, question marks

[Chiaki Ishikawa <Chiaki dot Ishikawa at personal-media dot co dot jp>]

X-PMC-CI-e-mail-id: 14224 

>> You can argue that all programs should call setlocale(LC_ALL,"") but this
>> doesn't practically work because:
>
>And this is what has to happen.  There are many more possibilities how
>you can shoot yourself in the foot by not setting the locales
>correctly.  Either you don't use locales or you do it correctly.

I think it takes a little while before the general
computing community, especially the programmers, begins
handling these locale issues correctly.

It is a gradual process. I don't think there is going to be
a "flag day" when all the major application begins
picking up locale and suddenly uses it correctly.
This adoption processt has to happen slowly and there will certainlby 
awkward memonts along the way.
But in the end, things shoudl turn out beneficial. (I hope).

Oh yes, after the programmers, the users have to learn
to modify their initialization script [.bashrc, .login, .cshrc, etc.].

I have no idea exactly how long it would take, but
it would happen and 
I praise the gnu libc efforts to incorporate these futures.
It is certainly a start and given that glibc is the choice of libc
on majority of  linux installations, the impact of having locale
will be heavy.
(SunOS has had these features for some time, but
the exposure and impact to the general computuing community
via this channel is much less than the impact GNU Lilnux+glibc
combination will have.)

This is an observation from a programmer/user who has seen
these problems with Japanese character handling over 15+ years.


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