Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006 08:54:33 +0200 (CEST) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@lurza.secnetix.de> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: LOCALE, Ltd.? Message-ID: <200604050654.k356sXKM035542@lurza.secnetix.de> In-Reply-To: <4432F5AF.4030201@daleco.biz>
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Kevin Kinsey <kdk@daleco.biz> wrote: > I'd been talking on a forum with a Linux database guy, > and he mentioned that on the PostGres lists, people > would "love to use *BSD" but the locale support is limited. > > Well, sure 'nough, `locale -a | wc -l` seems to be in the > mid-200s here, and his systems have over 550 locales. I think one of the main problems is that FreeBSD's support for multi-byte character sets such as UTF-8 is weak, to say the least. For example, syscons doesn't support it at all, neither many programs in the base system. The Linux folks really seem to be ahead in this regard. By the way, as for the argument of "400 countries" ... The number of locales doesn't have anything to do with the number of countries. For example, Switzerland requires at least three different locales (for Swiss German, Swiss French and Swiss Italian language). Furthermore you might need different character encodings (ISO8859-1, ISO8859-8, UTF-8 or even less common ones such as UTF-16), that'll double or triple the locales. And, no, "Foobar here" and "Foobar there" don't need to be the same -- for example, Austrian German has some different month names from German German. Yeah, sounds funny, but that's how the world is. I guess matters are even more complicated for our friends in the Asian areas. Best regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way. (On the statement print "42 monkeys" + "1 snake":) By the way, both perl and Python get this wrong. Perl gives 43 and Python gives "42 monkeys1 snake", when the answer is clearly "41 monkeys and 1 fat snake". -- Jim Fulton
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