At 07:55 AM 9/13/2006 -0700, Jeffrey Harris wrote:
Hi Folks,
Bug 6688, "calendar threw an exception at least once when in the French
locale", is assigned to me. I'm curious if anyone on the list has seen
this behavior before.
In the French locale, ',' should be used as a decimal point instead of
'.'. But I've been operating under the (perhaps mistaken) impression
that at least in Python 2.4, float() should be locale agnostic, and only
locale.atof() should have trouble with '.' as a decimal point.
So has Philippe found a bug in Python, or is there something else going
on here?
Well, the tricky thing is that the function float() uses internally just
converts '.' to the locale-specific decimal point, then calls strtod() --
which is locale-specific.
Looking at the C source of the conversion function Python uses, it appears
as though *in theory* a race condition could occur, where the conversion
function gets the current locale, replaces the decimal point in the input
string, and then somebody in another thread *changes* the locale, such that
the converted string doesn't match. In other words, float() converts it to
a French float string, and then it sees a non-French locale when converting
it. Such an error would be incredibly difficult to reproduce, and it would
require that the other thread be running pure C or C++ code without holding
the GIL. I don't know if this is even remotely possible as a cause here,
though. We would need to have something like that running in a thread
somewhere, and I don't know if we do. And it would have to be switching
locale stuff around.
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