Re: CVS commit: src/bin/sleep

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Mon, 28 Jan 2019 11:12:07 +0100
    From:        Kamil Rytarowski <n54%gmx.com@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <c2086dd7-10c8-0720-13c6-5b8cd53a523c%gmx.com@localhost>

  | In my perception yes. Such calls won't be portable and can stop to be
  | functional with tool upgrade/change.

Using fractional seconds isn't portable at all, if it isn't portable, and
you need portability, you just don't use it.   This is the same for all
kinds of extensions - they harm nothing if they're not used.  If
they are used, then there is obviously a good reason.  If there is
no use, then the extension was a waste of time, and may as well
be deleted - but that's rare, as someone usually has a use for it
to bother making it happen in the first place.

  | I have checked that some countries
  | use one or the other separator depending on region (like Canada).

Yes.   I am not sure what the point of that is though.  What's the
difference between users in two different areas in Canada, and users
in Engand and France (except the Canadians might be further apart) ?

  | There are also countries that might use different non-ASCII characters,

Yes, they might, and even if there are none, you can always just create
your own private locale like that.

  | at least the Arabic ones (momayyez). Supporting 2-3+ styles is opening
  | Pandora's box;

No-one is planning that.   There are two options - the C locale, or
the locale set in the environment.   That's all that will be supported
(unless we someday make a command that works for LC_NUMERIC
the way iconv works for LC_CTYPE).   When not using the C locale,
whatever the locale specifies should be supported, but it is not
sleep (or printf, or seq) doing that, it is strtod() (well, seq might do
a bit of it as well for unrelated reasons ... it wants to count the
number of digits in the arg strings that come after the radix char
for example).
 
  | while this style in computer science has narrow use-case
  | (mostly finances).

Computer Science is not the whole world - more people use NetBSD
than CS staff/students.

And once again, if you don't want to use other than the C locale
(except perhaps LC_CTYPE) then just don't...   Things work like
that, believe it or not!

kre