Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Sooner or later that will need to be defined. I know next to nothing
about locales. (I know I dislike the design C++ uses.)
D uses Utf-8, and that is *good enough*!
This lets my programs "understand" Finnish, and doesn't give me undue
headaches.
Seriously tending to locale issues would be an *endless swamp*. Just for
this, I looked up something suitable to read:
http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/perllocale/
It may even be that you would find the time, but think about Walter and
us, please. There *really are* other things to do.
An excellent string hierarchy without the entire rest of i18n, is only
going to look like a Ferrari with a Trabant engine. Which is worse than
nothing at all.
Besides, there's more to this than just designing the perfect, or even a
good locale system in a language. *Somebody should actually use it*.
Now, the non-English programmer, what does he really want? He wants to
be able to type stuff into his program in his native character set. D
already does that, by way of Utf-8.
What else? Well, it is conceivable that he wants his program to print
dates and times the way it's done over there. He simply writes the
program "by hand" so it does dates and times like he wants. Even if
there was a locale thing in the language, he wouldn't bother with the
hassle. And he couldn't care less about Urdu.
The hypothetical Ambitious Programmer might want to use locale. He could
then have the dates and times (and currencies, etc.) follow the country.
Now, that might sound commendable, but in practice it *crumbles*.
He can't possibly know how to deal with languages that are written
backwards, languages where several characters make one letter, exotic
ways of writing dates, etc.
So, his fancy i18n project is doomed to be, at most, as usable as the
"normal" D program. Probably less, since his decisions will actually
worsen the user experience -- for users in another culture.
And, any project big enough to tackle this, will implement its own
locale handling anyway. I'm sorry to say.
----
Yes, locales are nice and all.
For D 3.5 that is.
Honestly.
