Re: SRFI-14 and locale settings

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Kevin Ryde <address@hidden> writes:

> The setlocale call would be a good way.  Maybe the charset tables
> could be reinitialized in scm_setlocale (when setting LC_ALL or
> LC_CTYPE).  I suppose that'd be moderately helpful, and would make
> char-alphabetic? etc match how 1.6 worked.

In fact, I'm afraid we have a problem, because the `is' functions from
<ctype.h> are fully locale-dependent.  Thus, they don't only depend on
the charset being used but also on the language settings, which makes
them unsuitable for the implementation of `char-set:letter' (because it
should contain _all_ the letters representable with the current charset,
not only those of some particular language).

> But I guess really the
> notion of what a character represents beyond ascii isn't specified
> yet.

I'm not an expert in that domain, but the SRFI seemed to imply that the
notion of a letter is pretty well defined in Unicode (which is fortunate
because all the people using the various scripts do know what a letter
is in their script ;-)).

Thanks,
Ludovic.