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Re: [PATCH] Fix decimal_point and thousands_sep in es_MX locale


On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 12:48:28PM -0400, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> Petr,
> 
> Several standards say that there should be a thin space between
> the thousand separator, but the glibc locales have been using an
> ASCII space <U0020> instead of the thin space <U2009>.
> 
> Do you know of any reason for this?

My *guess* is the reason is mostly historical. It seems that before
2000, locale files did not use Unicode codepoints but markup like <SP>,
which was then mechanically rewritten to <U0020> and noone bothered to
change it further; new locale authors likely did not think much of it
and/or copied data from existing locales using <U0020>.

I would certainly approve of updating this to thin space where
appropriate. However, I think that

  (i) Some programs might get confused by this; the person doing the
change should check at least behavior of common office programs after
this change (not sure if there is any other common software using this
data?), and possibly discuss this with their developers if there are
problems.

  (ii) We should do the change en masse at least in most locales that
are appropriate to change, so that any possible bugs in handling of
Unicode characters in these fields are quickly noticed and fixed.

Hope that this does not sound as too much work; I could help with
some of it, but do not have time to do the whole change by myself.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
	Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better
	than the other way around.  -- Eric S. Raymond


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