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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Wasteful internationalization (Was: Structured exception
	information)
From: Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>
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Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:12:00 +0100
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Date: 2007-01-26T13:12:00+01:00
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On Fri, 2007-01-26 at 10:13 +0100, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jan 2007 15:57:29 -0600, Randy Brukardt wrote:

> > This gave me a vision of a fully internationalized Ada program written in
> > Cyrillic (or Chinese or Thai or ...). Just a mass of funny looking
> > characters. Just imagine the portability!
> 
> Oh, Ada could become much "better" here!
> 
> German Excel (and I believe Russian as well) uses "," instead of "." in all
> numbers. What a refreshing idea!

For about half a year it was my daily job to extract numbers
from handwritten Excel sheets for processing, without access to
MS programming tools. An added challenge has been that their format
changed every other week, and even in the same column of the
same week.

OTOH, Excel numbers aren't usually produced by programmers
for programmers, so they are somewhat "human".
And this is right, because it helps efficient human
communication where this form of communication dominates.
For another refreshing insight, have a look at the separators
for groups of 10**3 in Switzerland, or consider calender date
formats. But OTOH most programmers' *refuse* to add type to
the most useless

  date: Pattern :=
   Digit & Digit & Sep & Digit & Digit & Sep & Digit & Digit;

Why is that? They could, for example, use ISO dates,
or grammar based date formats for disambiguation:

 <date y="2007"
       m="5"
       d="6"   />

Hm. Maybe this is an opportunity to create a few instances
of the new 2007 standard generic function

  Ada.Tags.Generic_Dispatching_Constructor

 -- georg