Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

Anton Ertl wrote:

"Stephen Fuld" <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> writes:

Anton Ertl wrote:
 

"Stephen Fuld" <SFuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> writes:

If the mechanisms that you and Anton present were so easily
available, why do I see so many instances of "non separated"
outputs?

 
What locale are you using?

 
I happen to be in the US, however . . . 
 
 
When I mentioned "in this NG", I meant posts that present the
outputs of some similation program, reduced trace data, GREP
output, etc.

 
So the question is what locale the posters in this newsgroup use.  I
typically use the C.utf8 locale, because then ls sorts directories as
Thompson intended, but which does not show thousands separator.  If I
want to show thousands separators, I usually do it with
 
LC_NUMERIC=prog <command>
 
or (on machines where I have not installed the prog locale):
 
LC_NUMERIC=en_US <command>
 
Let's see how that works for some programs:
 
[c8:~:105615] LC_NUMERIC=prog perf stat true
 
 Performance counter stats for 'true':
 
              0.17 msec task-clock                #    0.376 CPUs
utilized                  0      context-switches          #    0.000
K/sec                  0      cpu-migrations            #    0.000
K/sec                 42      page-faults               #    0.242
M/sec            470_561      cycles                    #    2.716 GHz
             5_214      stalled-cycles-frontend   #    1.11% frontend
cycles idle             28_375      stalled-cycles-backend    #
6.03% backend cycles idle            515_987      instructions
#    1.10  insn per cycle
#    0.05  stalled cycles per insn            103_096      branches
#  595.157 M/sec              4_973      branch-misses             #
4.82% of all branches
 
       0.000460708 seconds time elapsed
 
       0.000522000 seconds user
       0.000000000 seconds sys

I would be happier with that (using an underscore for the thousands
separator) than with no separation.  Of course, that is a personal
preference, and others may have different ones.

 
I don't know what simulation program you have in mind, or what
reduction method you have in mind for trace data, or a grep option
that produces big numbers, but one thing I often do with grep or other
output is to pipe it to wc.  So let's see:
 
[c8:~:105619] LC_NUMERIC=prog wc -c types.bib
21028 types.bib
 
So, no luck here; one can use printf to reformat the output, e.g.
 
LC_NUMERIC=prog printf "%'d %s\n" `wc -c types.bib`
 
but I have never done that.

I agree that it could be done, but rarely, if ever is.

 

For the decimal separator every programming
language uses ".".

 
 
Do they?

 
In the source code, every one that I have ever encountered, and likely
most that I have not.  Sure, there is the Algol 60 and Algol 68
crazyness of making that implementation-defined, but are there any
implementations of these languages that do not use "." for the decimal
point?
 

I vaguely remember that in COBOL (which was defined before
locale were a thing), if you specified "Decimal is Comma" (I may
have the syntax wrong), then the decimal speparator became the
comma.

 
In the source code?

I had tolook this up, as it has been far to long, but yes.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.3?topic=section-decimal-point-is-comma-clause

And was is the default?

No, if you wanted to use this, you added the "Decimal point is comma"
statement in the configuration section.  Note that this is obsolete, as
COBOL now supports some version of locales.

And how many programs
used this option?

I have no idea.  I never did, though all the COBOL programs I wrote
were for US only.  On the other hand, IBM supported it in their COBOL
compiler and I believe it was part of the ANSI standard.




--
 - Stephen Fuld
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)