by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/04/18 06:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/04/18/577951.aspx
The thing about locales is that are an attempt to capture a pretty huge bundle of settings that amount to defaults for how to handle a lot of the international functionality on the machine.
An application can do all of that work itself, but that is usually the best way to miss the way users will expect some particular setting....
This point was recently made clear by Raymond Chen in his post entitled Locale-sensitive number grouping. It is one of those very interesting settings that is clearly the subject of strong user expectations combined with a systemic lack of awareness of the expectations of others.
I'd get more into the topic, but I saw this note at the end of the post:
Next time, a little more about that
NUMBERFMT
structure.
So I think I'll hold off until I see if there is anything I wanted to talk about that I had not gotten to yet.... :-)
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