Re: [boost] [locale] Review

Subject: Re: [boost] [locale] Review
From: Gevorg Voskanyan (v_gevorg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-04-19 03:22:00

Artyom wrote:
> There are two  problems:
> 
> 1. Every medium size C++ project uses C libraries. And they 
>    will always be there.
> 2. When C++ locale's system is quite broken  in its current state
>    and useless for most of users then you can't  expect them
>    to be aware of such issues.
> 
> The other problem is  that I hear complains about
> it too frequently:
> 
> - libdbi mailing list  is full of it and there is open bug
> - SOCI has issues 
> - The problem with  lexical cast rise once in a while in 
>   Boost's list.
> 
> No, if  something causes bugs too frequently then there
> is something wrong with the  concept.
> 
> Artyom

So your design wrt. this is: nothing is localized unless explicitly requested 
to. That avoids having something accidentally localized when you don't want 
that, e.g. csv, serialization, some network protocol, whatever. But that is at 
the expense of making a way for the opposite kind of bugs: when something is not 
localized but should be. For example what does 02/03/2011 mean. Imagine a 
program where all dates in other places that are shown to the user are properly 
localized, but this one isn't due to a programmer omission. The result is, well, 
a very angry user with all its consequences.

I'm not going to argue which one is more important. We lose something either 
way. And this concern is what the reviewers had in mind when they brought the 
issue up in this thread. In this respect yes, C++ standard library has design 
issue, but Boost.Locale has one too. It's a design choice, which happens to be 
different between C++ std lib and your lib. And I have no problem with that. But 
the documentation can discuss this issue in detail, describe common traps and 
the ways to avoid them. It can also have a general advice: if you want to 
localize your software, pay extra attention to what you want to be localized and 
what you don't.

Gevorg