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Re: Two trivial questions


From: Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)
Subject: Re: Two trivial questions
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2021 01:11:28 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/78.14.0

Hello Peter,

On 10/26/21 11:07 PM, Peter Schaffter wrote:
Second question, maybe not so trivial.  Is it acceptable to use a
comma for decimal fractions that are arguments to requests and
macros (say .ps 12,5 instead of .ps 12.5) if a user's locale
supports it?


I ignore if groff technically accepts that as input. But the same as I strongly discourage naming your variables and functions in a language other than English, I strongly discourage using any locale other than the C locale in your source code. If next year some person from a different country takes your code, commas may not mean the same for that person.

Please, use international languages and conventions. Locales are useful for interacting with the user of a program, not for writing the program itself. And by program, please extend the interpretation to any source code, including groff input.

Thanks,

Alex


--
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/



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