Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote: > From past comments I read here, it is understood now that locale > identifiers used to select languages contain a country/territory code > only as a legacy way to select language variants. This code is meant > to designate the language variant as spoken in that area, but not for > identifying a location.
IMHO this is at, or at least near, the heart of much of the confusion surrounding locales and the use of language/country pairs to denote them. The issue of "French as spoken in Switzerland" versus "French as spoken in Canada" is totally unrelated to the issue of Swiss conventions versus Canadian conventions for sorting, date and time format, decimal separator, and so forth. As for time zones, I agree completely with Mark that they should be handled separately from all other locale settings, and not dependent on them in any way. Not only do people travel, and need to change their time zone setting while leaving everything else alone, but states and countries do sometimes change from one time zone to another. The Olson data shows how common that is. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
