Re: Motion 46: NO
John, P-1788,
On 07/19/2013 11:59 AM, John Pryce wrote:
Vincent, P1788
On 2013 Jul 19, at 11:28, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
I vote NO on Motion 46 (Interval literals).
The text contains various ambiguities about literals of host language
and locales.
I agree with most of Vincent's criticisms. Chair, since this is a vote on the ideas, not actual text, are we allowed to carry on as if appropriate friendly amendments have been proposed and accepted?
I see no harm in altering the exact text, as long as the general framework
is followed if the vote passes. (We will need to vote on the actual text,
anyway, in that case.) The "no" votes can help explain what to do
next if the motion doesn't pass. (Would it mean we shouldn't have literals
at all, or something else?)
A few seem to pose a dilemma or at least to require discussion.
In particular:
langNumLit {number literal of host language}
For instance, if the host language is C, what would a number literal be?
A number literal in a C source (the C standard says "integer constant"
and "floating constant")? An input of strtod(), which is the numeric
version of what text2interval is for intervals? This is different as
strtod() is sensitive to locales concerning the decimal-point character
and also case sensitiveness I assume.
Now, are interval literals intended to be sensitive to locales, at least
in some contexts like in C?
It seems the locale issue will be both tricky and verbose if we address it in detail (Turkish "i" vs "ı", comma vs period in numbers, etc). So I think this standard should apply to the "default locale", and implementations *may* make locale-specific variations. Would that do? My understanding of locales is shaky.
We might define "default locale." I have been working at this long
enough to
remember systems that only had the 26 upper case Roman letters, plus one or
two punctuation marks. I'm not even sure they had "[" and "]".
My own (perhaps biased) opinion of a "default" is standard
128 character ASCII, but the expansion of that acronym explicitly contains
the word "American" in it (/American Standard Code for Information
Interchange/). There
are more recent possibilities that may be more inclusive, but perhaps
less universally
available in systems and programming languages (Unicode?). In any
case, it might not be totally
clear what the default locale should be.
Baker
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R. Baker Kearfott, rbk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (337) 482-5346 (fax)
(337) 482-5270 (work) (337) 993-1827 (home)
URL: http://interval.louisiana.edu/kearfott.html
Department of Mathematics, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
(Room 217 Maxim D. Doucet Hall, 1403 Johnston Street)
Box 4-1010, Lafayette, LA 70504-1010, USA
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