by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/02/19 05:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/02/19/1713911.aspx
I am pretty sure I have mentioned Chris Walker before on this blog....
Anyway, the other day after that whole conversation about digits happened, he pointed out something interesting:
It is interesting to note how little of Vista uses FoldString( ..MAP_FOLDDIGITS)
Looks like common dialogs uses it, and notepad of course. but little else.
(Chris was alluding to the thing I pointed out here)
There is actually a very good reason that so little code actually uses native digits.
And it is not due to some conspiracy of internationalization lameness on the part of all developers.
The cause of this issue is digit substitution, a subject I have mentioned in the past.
The support of this feature in so much of Windows and the .NET Framework has actually made sure that most applications appear to support native digits that the user is likely to be trying to do something with. This even goes down to the level of keyboard layouts, many of which just include the ASCII digits even though from a user standpoint they appear be those native digits.
Now I have both good and bad feelings about this -- good because the support is much wider than it would be if we were relying on people to read this blog or something. And bad because it means that even in gigabytes of source that make up Windows there are just a handful of apps that even try to parse the native digits, which can genuinely be in user data and which one day could require some kind of parsing.
At which point I guess those 28 developers can just find their way here, right? :-)
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