Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

"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 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.

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?  And was is the default?  And how many programs
used this option?

Perhpa this wasn't brought forward.  But then if you use the period for
the three digits separator and the decimal separator, doesn't that
cause confusion?

There are certainly cases where it would.  But I don't think anybody
proposed that.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>