XPost: comp.lang.fortran, comp.lang.c++   
   From: eesnimi@osa.pri.ee   
      
   On 1/26/2026 10:07 AM, David Brown wrote:   
      
   >   
   > IME, locale settings can be a bigger hinder than help, especially on   
   > Windows and with MS Office.   
   Right. When using locales, the result of the program run is not   
   deterministic as you never know what locale might be installed by the   
   user. On top of that, the code using locales is often several times   
   slower, especially in multithreaded programs where threads are sharing   
   the common global locale. Seems like a lose-lose situation to me.   
      
   Locales are only useful when displaying info directly for the user to   
   view. Alas, most C++ projects are not GUI, but much lower level   
   libraries where there is no connection between the current machine   
   locale and the locale of the human viewer who might eventually view the   
   produced data. Moreover, most produced text data is consumed by other   
   software nowadays, not humans, and having to deal with varying locales   
   just breaks or at least complicates the things here. So locale-dependent   
   behavior should not be the default, but rather something to be ordered   
   explicitly and used rarely.   
      
   Of course, i18n is a broader topic than locales, and will fail in more   
   braindead ways as well. Just today MS Teams kindly informed me that the   
   tab "Files" has been renamed to "Shared". However, it did in Estonian,   
   so the help balloon box talked about renaming the tab to "Ühiskasutuses"   
   and at the same time pointing to the real tab which was named totally   
   differently - "Jagatud". Both of these are legitimate translations of   
   "Shared", but the translators of the tab and of the help balloon   
   apparently did not cooperate. So the help balloon was really more   
   confusing than helpful.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)