He and his team lead had no idea how such a bug missed 11 years of peer-QA through all edits on that module / activity.
It was as simple as converting to string and back and hitting an edge case on internationalization with commas vs periods.
Or, if the website reads some string from the back end, like say a config value "DefaultCreditLimit", the user night be able to modify the interpretation of it.
I've come to the conclusion that this automatic behavior that tries to guess at the format required is simply wrong. If a program wants user-specific formatting, it should opt-in.
That said, my favorite localization issues stem from CH/Switzerland. Numbers are formatted as 1'000.00 there (someone correct me), which is especially odd:
1) That's a weird decimal separator. DE uses a , and as far as I know FR uses a , as well. I _assume_ IT uses a , - so why is this a . in CH?
2) The ' really kills a lot of naive parsers and causes quite a bit of frustration in other fields (think OCR - some overly fat 1'000 might turn into a 11000 with bad luck/crappy image quality or (marginally better) lead to 1000 where means 'I think here's a character, but no clue what that might be')
Yes, different conventions exist (in this case the thread drifted to bugs based on locales, so obviously we're talking about different conventions here). I .. don't understand what you're saying.
(and my original post is missing an asterisk in two places, as in 1?000 as OCR result for example - messed up the formatting in the middle of the night)
2) Actually, I find it much more confusing that people are constantly using . and , for two completely different functions and not get confused about it. Mistaking a . for a , and vice-versa is quite easy.
And that not even considers the likely confusion for people coming from countries with different rules.
OTOH an ' is highly distinct visually from both a , and . so it's always clear that it can't be the decimal separator.
Fortunately, after the predicable mass panic, they were eventually able to relocate the satellite.
This sounds extremely sloppy, especially for satellite control software. Anything not fitting exactly the expected format should lead to an error so the operator can immediately correct it, not be silently ignored.
Another I've seen is the potential landmine that can go of at ANY time and then one day, 5 years in the future, it hits you at 2AM and you can't figure out WTF is happening.