Re: ctype, chrtbl, rune tables and POSIX2008

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 10:32:19PM +0900, Takehiko NOZAKI wrote:
> hi, all.
> 
> early stage of implementation of POSIX2008's multi-locale such as *_l
> function is here.
> (i wrote it for more 2years ago, need to catch up -current)
> 
> ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/tnozaki/multi-locale-snapshot-20090102.tar.gz
> 
> more information, see following tech-userlevel discussion:
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.netbsd.devel.userlevel/10401

Your snapshot includes two different interfaces and I would like to get
a consensus on what we want to support.

One part is the POSIX2008 explicit locale interface. Essentially, all
functions operating on locale-sensitive data get a version which has
the locale as explicit argument. E.g. isalpha(ch) -> isalpha_l(ch, l).
This is highly desirable for multi-thread applications or programs
dealing with input in different languages at the same time.

The second part is the Linux/Darwin Thread Local Locale interface.
Basically, this allows setting a locale for the current thread without
modifying the global (fall back) locale. IMO this is just insane and
repeating the mistakes of the original locale interface. I am strongly
in favour of *not* implementing this.

Joerg