Decimal separator on international keyboards
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#14 Decimal separator on international keyboards
I wouldn't mind using "." or "," as a decimal separator, but the thing is: On a German keyboard there's a comma on the number key block, so it's much easier for me to enter a "," with numbers.
In earlier versions Wcalc expected a "," with my German system settings, but with Wcalc 2.4 on OS X 10.4.11 I have a problem: I can set "Use different input number format from output" with "Decimal Separator" set to ",". This only works when I set "Grouping Separator to something else like "." (Why that? What does Grouping Separator mean exactly? When I enter "12.345,678" I get "Confusing number format (12,345.678)")
Then numbers like 12,34 work, but when I quit the application and open it again, the settings are forgotten.
I've set the category to file, because these preferences are not saved, but also Interface (GUI) would fit.
So, the error is that the preferences aren't being saved? Ahh, I see. Okay.
The grouping separator is for thousands. For example, in America, you can write ten thousand as 10,000. The idea is that it makes the major separations more clear. The grouping separator *should* only allowed on the left side of the decimal, but there seem to be some bugs here. I'll see what I can do.
Yes, the main problem for me is that the preferences aren't being saved. With that being fixed, I'd be happy.
Apart from that you might think about what the default behaviour depending on language system settings or the keyboard should be. For me it worked in the earlier versions of Wcalc, but others might have German, French, Spanish, Italian settings, but an English keyboard, which some prefer because of the brackets. So maybe for some these settings are useful (if saved).
With the grouping separator set to "." (common in Germany, next to " "), I get an error when I enter 10.000 (meaning ten thousand): "Confusing number format (10,000)" I don't really need it the grouping separator in the input anyway.
Okay - I've fixed the preference saving business, and figured out the bug in the grouping handling (oddly, it's a bug that only affected the GUI, due to using a slightly different version of lex to compile the number parser).
The way Wcalc works is that it takes the system language settings to determine the output format, *always*. It uses them to interpret the input as well unless the user has set this particular preference and changed the input (e.g. if a German user has an English keyboard, or whatever the case may be). I suppose there might be some who are interested in having Wcalc output numbers in a format that is different from the system language settings, but... so far nobody's asked, so why go to the trouble? :)
This is fixed. The changes are in the current CVS tree, and will be in the next
release. Thanks for catching it!