LC_MESSAGES problem ?

[Markus Kuhn]

Won-kyu Park wrote on 2000-11-20 17:32 UTC:
> There are many programs [that] do not use setlocale(LC_CTYPE,"").

These are rapidly getting fewer every minute these days and your
contribution in eleminating them is very welcome. :)

> some programs are LC_CTYPE sensitive (like isctype() etc.) and then
> set the LC_CTYPE as 'C'.

If you want to have locale-independent character types, then best do not
use locale-dependent ISO C functions. Setting LC_CTYPE='C' in programs
that require locale-dependent ISO C functions to be locale independent
is a bad idea and that should be fixed.

The underlying problem is that most C developers are unfamiliar with C's
locale model and wide character facilities, because these topics were
skipped by K&R (2nd ed.), an old but very popular C textbook that
unfortunately teaches only a subset of C's standard library.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: < http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ >