In Russian language thousands are separated with spaces or not separated at all. In glibc's locale `thousands_sep' is set to a point (even though `mon_thousands_sep' is correctly set to space). I checked with CVS, this is still true.
I assume you are talking about the ru_RU locale? Should it be space (0x20) or non-breaking space (0xA0)? I've send an email to the previous contributors for the ru_RU locale (Sergei Ivanov, Vadim V. Zhytnikov, Ilya Ovchinnikov and Alexander V. Lukyanov) to get their comments on this change request. Do you have any official looking Russian documents/web pages specifying or using monetary formating with space instead of period?
Subject: Re: Russian `thousands_sep' should be a space (0x20), not a dot (0x2E) > I assume you are talking about the ru_RU locale? Yes. > Should it be space (0x20) or non-breaking space (0xA0)? Well, if non-breaking space is possible in context of glib, then of course it is a much better option. > I've send an email to the previous contributors for the ru_RU > locale (Sergei Ivanov, Vadim V. Zhytnikov, Ilya > Ovchinnikov and Alexander V. Lukyanov) to get their comments on this > change request. > > Do you have any official looking Russian documents/web pages > specifying or using monetary formating with space instead of > period? Here is the most official recommendation I found in a brief search (in Russian): http://spravka.gramota.ru/buro.html?gotoq=145837 Crude translation of the answer to English: Technical rules of typing direct to separate into groups number which have at least 4 digits (groups of 3 digits each, right to left). A dot between groups is prohibited. Correct is: 12 680 459,30. A few "non-official" arguments I have: * I _never ever_ saw dots as thousands separator in well-published books and in the few books I checked, spaces were used (e.g. in a Biological Encyclopedia). I tend not to consider books from 1990 and onwards as in the computer age the state of book formatting decreased significantly. * I remember Artemiy Lebedev's (a well-known Russian designer) opinion on this topic: spaces or no separators at all. While he is not a linguist, he is a man who doesn't say something he doesn't know about. He is one of a few people whom I trust even in areas they are not professionals in. Unfortunately, my HDD failured recently, so I currently can't easily read/answer mail. My replies to this thread may be very delayed during a few weeks. Paul
I agree that the separator should be the space or nothing. The dot is never used for this purpose in Russian.
The rationale look good to me. I'll try to find time to prepare a patch for the glibc maintainers.
Created attachment 216 [details] Patch to fix ru_RU locale This is the patch I propose based on the input from the bug reporter and previous contributor.
Any reason why this trivial patch is being held back for so long?
I've been told that, if a space is used, then it is traditionally EN SPACE <U2002> no <U00A0>. For encodings which don't have <U2002> it can be transliterated to <U00A0> but if this is right, <U2002> should be used.
No response in 6+ months. Closing.
There's a patch, the bug is confirmed but is closed... Great future for GNU software...
Fixed as part of bug 3842. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 3842 ***