On 02/18/2015 11:21 PM, Rick Widmer wrote: > On 2/18/2015 7:44 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: >> Now if we went into Unicode territory, we could do it. eg. >> >> my_func(1 999 999) U+1680 (although it looks too much like a -) >> my_func(1 999 999) U+205F (mathematical space) >> my_func(1٬999٬999) U+066C (Arabic thousands separator) >> my_func(1·999·999) U+00B7 (middle dot) >> >> The last one looks best to me, but we'd need a team of people working in >> shifts to answer the, "How do I type this?" question. >> >> -Rasmus > > how about: > > my_func( '1,000.04' ); //if you want to use separators there.
The problem with that is that the world is split. The other half, or actually more than half, would write that as '1.000,04'. There is no way we would want to take sides on that one. And we have support for locale-based number formatting and parsing via numfmt_format() and numfmt_parse(). If we were going to add a separator for literals, the only real low-ascii choice is _ which is also used by Ada, D, Java, Perl and Ruby. I was 90% kidding about using a Unicode character, but if you think about it a bit, most people are using IDEs or at least smart scriptable editors, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to picture your editor pretty-printing 1234567890 as 1·234·567·890 or 1˙234˙567˙890 (U+02D9). It would be easy to make the parser ignore that character in numeric literals. Much easier than working out the various issues with _ anyway. Although, personally it would freak me out if my editor started messing with my numbers on me. But I don't use an IDE. I don't even have syntax-highlighting turned on in my vim config. We didn't have stuff like that on the Wyse 50. -Rasmus
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