On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 05:15:05PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 2:39 PM -0500 1/15/04, Dan Sugalski wrote: > >At 8:31 PM +0100 1/15/04, Michael Scott wrote: > >>Is this relevant? > >>http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/userguide/formatNumbers.html > >> > >>I'm still not clear in my mind what the plan is with regard to ICU. > >>Is it intended eventually to be: > >> > >> a) an always-there part of parrot, or > >> b) just a sometimes-there thing that gets linked in if you > >>mess with unicode? > >> > > > >A) is the case. I didn't realize that the ICU library did numeric > >formatting. > > And then I realized, somewhat belatedly, that this won't necessarily work.
Won't work, or work but potentially have too much overhead? > I think I'd rather not have to yank things into Unicode just to > format numbers. I'm not quite sure what you mean here. > Hrm. To reinvent the wheel or paint the bikeshed--that is the question. I've heard it said that to really understand the wheel you have to reinvent it. In this case I think we have more important things to invent than number formatting. It would seem almost reckless to spend time working on reinventing number formatting when part of parrot already has it and, I presume, has it done well and maintained by others. I'm sure if we go our own way we'll pay for it later, as well as now. Wouldn't we have to support formatting numbers into unicode strings anyway? Isn't locale handling a headache we'd much rather leave to someone else? Tim.
