From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 03:26:18 CDT
On Wednesday, May 12, 2004 8:00 PM, Peter Constable va escriure:
> It's not particularly useful to communicate that a document was
> created when a locale with such-and-such number format was in effect,
Sure?
: Please send to us 100.000 units of your item 12010, available to our
: warehouse by 6/7/04. We agree with the current tariff.
Now it happens that I do NOT have such item 12010, only 12001 or 21001. And
with the former, 100000 may take sense, and 100 definitively does not. But
with the latter, 100 takes sense, 100000 is probably too much (and anyway I
do not have that much merchandise available.) Units may be kg or t, in fact,
so 3 decimals is adequate. What should I send? When?
Of course, the guy is away from office, cellphone is down, etc.
Well, it is true that what I really search for is not *exactly* the
formatting locale, but rather another wider information, which would be the
mind setting of the writer. But if the document happens to carry the locale
it was formatted with, then I have an hint about its correct meaning.
I agree beforehand that the locale id would not be a certain answer, just an
hint. This might not be what you had in mind.
I have another example, but I cannot expose it here publicly, it is related
to some proprietary software. Let just say that the knowledge of the locale
under which the document was created/formatted, was a preceptive knowledge
to be able to render it correctly.
> because that only meant how automated processes would format numbers,
> the author can choose to do something else, and the document can even
> use multiple formats: 1,234.56 as well as 1.234,56 (and it's not hard
> to imagine how the two formats might have been automatically added to
> the document at different times). Moreover, you would never label a
> document for a number format in order to determine how
> automated-formatting of numbers should be done on the receiving
> system.
I do not know about Mark, but at least I did. Now with EDIFACT there are
agreements to avoid possible misunderstandings (so the tagging results
useless, in fact it is already done at a superior level), but it was not
always the case. And I did see, and even make, processes that deals with
similarly tagged datas.
For a nowadays example, think about an i15d standalone program that emits
checks. I would expect such a program to be subsumed with a given locale
(according to the nationality of the check to emit), then fed with the
correct datas. Now, if the subsuming process is itself a generic one, it
will itself be fed with datas labeled with the format to be used.
Of course, we are very far away from Unicode here, even further from plain
text such as Ken asks us to stick with. Clearly, the locale ids here are
attributes, and even have almost nothing to do languages, so it might be
inappropriate for CLDR as well (this is obscure to me at the moment.)
That is just to say that while I agree with the fundamental of your
distinction, I also believe that the fact that locales have been "reduced"
(historically for the need of APIs) to locale ids, did then allow to use
these to tag documents. And while one may argue this is "bad", there is also
no way to stop people doing so...
Antoine
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