Alain Bench <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Thursday, June 23, 2005 at 3:16:28 PM +0200, Hrvoje Niksic wrote: > >> Since Wget 1.10 also prints sizes in kilobytes/megabytes/etc., I am >> thinking of removing the thousand separators from size display. > > IMHO thousand (or myriad) separators are necessary. > > This size display is primarily intended for humans, not for other > apps.
Primarily yes -- which is why Wget 1.10 also shows the size in units. But it is also convenient as input for other applications, which is very hard with the thousand separators. > If separators constitute a difficulty for other apps, then it's > these other apps problem. Or sed's task (s/,//g). It's not the other apps problems. In many applications (e.g. programming languages, but also programmable calculators) "," is a separator between function arguments and cannot be used inside the number. In fact, I know of no application that accepts numbers as Wget prints them. (sed is not readily available when I paste Wget's output into another program such as bc or calc.) > Humans can have habit to look at exact unit size, or rounded > kilo/mega/tera size, or both. It would be a regression to reduce > readability of legacy exact bytes count, The way I see it, with the unit sizes present, omitting the thousand separators merely removes redundancy, not useful information. More importantly, I know of no other command-line program that prints sizes with thousand separators the way Wget does, with no way to get the ordinary parsable numbers. If the users were so used to separators, they would surely request them in other programs, such as `ls', `du', or `df'? > I don't really understand nor follow your reasons against > localization. User's cultural preferences should be respected. You can make a case that the correct character and layout should be used for digit grouping when it is deployed, but I don't see how you can argue that grouping *must* be used in all applications! The appearance of grouped digits can be and is described by the locale, but no locale mandates grouping to be used for display of all numbers. As for localization, I'm not against it. The argument was that, where possible, I prefer the output of applications to remain parsable. For example, I consider the ISO 8601 date format a clear advantage over the asctime() format. The same goes for the display of integers.
