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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

Impossible to easily solve programatically. E.g. 400,123: what is it? You cannot know unambiguously.

And using OS language settings won't help either. Im from Europe but would not want to require using "," for the decimal separator enforced by OS settings, or anything related to programming or communicating with people on the Internet would become difficult.

I'd much rather have just everyone use the same convention for this. The C-locale convention for example. But for dates, please don't use the non-sorted American order. For dates the Japanese have it right :)

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Or you could include these regional conventions in the character encoding, so that each file knows how it represent its numbers, and enforce them consistently throughout applications.

That would be a easy programmatic way to solve the problem, that wouldn't require the whole world to adopt a single standard. But of course it'll never happen, as it would require that all programmers know their shit and follow good practices, when it's much easier to throw the technical debt onto users and let them cope with the problem.

It would require to adopt a single standard, that is, how to encode that in the character encoding and the files. And it would still not stop someone from in the same browser for example using sometimes one notation, sometimes the other notation, depending on e.g. if they're filling in a form for a European bank, or something related to programming.

You mean, exactly like you do with character encodings for different alphabets?

>Or you could include these regional conventions in the character encoding, so that each file knows how it represent its numbers, and enforce them consistently throughout applications.

So if I open a file in Notepad and type 400,123 (using the comma on my keyboard), what character encoding should that be done with?

The one that Notepad has configured by default in your OS version, unless you choose a different encoding when saving the file.

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