Re: wxWidgets terminal : locale "C" ?

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 16 September 2005 04:57 pm, Ethan Merritt wrote:
>
> Please try attached patch.
> Keep an eye open for unexpected side-effects.

The side-effects may outweigh the benefit.
I really don't know what the correct thing to do is here,
partly because I'm from part of the world that doesn't use
a comma for a decimal point.

The patch changed gnuplot's scanner routine to accept
commas as part of a number.  That is necessary if the user
has used "set decimalsign locale", because in this case numbers
belonging to a gnuplot command line are interpreted according
to the current LOCALE_NUMERIC.

On the other hand this makes many gnuplot commands ambiguous
at best:

	set label 1 offset 1,2

I would have expected this to set the offset to (xoff=1 yoff=3 zoff=0)
but now it instead sets (xoff=1,2 yoff=0 zoff=0).
Is that acceptable?  Is it what a user would expect, if he has gone
to the trouble of setting a decimalsign == comma locale?

But the current, unpatched, state of the code has problems also.
  set decimalsign locale
  show locale
        LC_CTYPE is fr_FR
        LC_NUMERIC is fr_FR
        LC_TIME is C
  PI = 3.14159
  print PI
	3.0
  print pi
	3,14159265358979

That is both wrong, and puzzling.  I can understand why PI gets
set to 3 on input - that's the effect of sscanf() or atod() with
LC_NUMERIC set to fr_FR.  But why does it revert to a dot for the
decimal sign on output? Notice that the internal constant "pi" is
printed with a comma, as I would have expected.  Strange.

Anyhow, while I can see some attraction to being able to type
contants into gnuplot using a locale-modified decimal sign, e.g.
  PI = 3,14159
I suspect that it breaks too many other commands.

Perhaps a better way is to force LC_NUMERIC to C during the
scanning of a gnuplot input line.  That means all numbers on a
gnuplot command line must use dot rather than comma as a 
decimal sign.  Then to fix the original bug report, any code
that *constructs* a gnuplot command line, must *also* set
LC_NUMERIC to C while it operates.
That would include both the built-in functions like zoom and the
interpretation of key bindings.

Let's have some input from people using a locale with a comma
for LC_NUMERIC.  Should gnuplot command line syntax be affected
by LC_NUMERIC, or not?

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742