[Haskell-cafe] Re: Float instance of 'read'

[Aaron Denney]

On 2008-09-17, Mauricio <briqueabraque at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Localized reading should be somewhere else, perhaps related to Locales.
>
> No! If we had that, string from a program would not
> be readable by some program running in other machine,
> or other locale. As, actually, you describe below.
> Show and Read are for programs reading, not for
> user reading. That's a work for Pango :)

UI can be done with text, and in any case includes text and there
should be some nice way to localize that.  The locale system is the
standard way to do that on Unix.  These strings are not meant for
program-to-program communication, whereas read and show are.

IMAO, it's bloody well stupid to use commas for either the decimal
separator or the thousands separator, as it has a well established
role in separating the items in a list that conflicts with this.
While a thousands separator can improve readability, it's not strictly
necessary.  OTOH, a decimal separator is necessary.  As the comma's not
usable, that leaves us with the decimal point, and no thousands separator.
Lo and behold, that's exactly what Haskell uses.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-