Dominic Dunlop wrote:
On 4 Jun 2005, at 20:40, Paul Schinder wrote:
The question is, should perl be able to handle whatever is in that
locale slot, even if it makes no sense, or at least give a more useful
error message?
I don't think it's reasonable to ask perl to do anything sensible or
helpful when presented with a decimal_point this silly.
Actually, I'm on the other side of the fence now (now that I looked at the
code). It does appear that Perl intends to correctly handle other radix
characters than period (although toke.c only understands that one). I haven't
exactly worked out the sequence of events but it's clear that 'use locale' does
munge the input sufficiently so that non-period radixes should be interpreted
properly.
What I realized was that the one character that has even more special behavior
is the single quote. This used to be used (pre Perl5?) as the package qualifier
(what we now use :: for), so the "numbers" in question area probably being
parsed as weird package variables, so locale cannot do anything useful with them.
John
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