[Pw_forum] Re: Xcrysden error

[Axel Kohlmeyer]

On Sat, 14 Apr 2007, Onime Clement wrote:

OC> Hmm,
OC> 
OC> 
OC> > aiiiih! 
OC> > 
OC> > another victim of NLS!
OC> > why-oh-why do people insist on this nonsense??
OC> > 
OC> The fundamental question is NLS or Unicode an issue for fortran or C
OC> code's or some internal representation of numbers, I don't think so as
OC> it is purely a visual problem?

it _is_ an issue for scientific applications, since they write out 
and parse some (temporary) data in text format, usually to improve
portability or to allow users to examine the results without the 
need for a specific viewer program.

OC> Anyhow a bug report to the site of xcrysden is in order, I think the
OC> developers could be encouraged to make a query to find out the right NLS
OC> decimal separator or use NLS calls for handling numbers.

this is plain undoable. most progam maintainers put in an 
insane effort to keep their packages runnable and up-to-date
with the scientific problems. burdening them with making 
everything NLS clean on top of that would be insane.
we're not talking about people that actually get paid to 
do this kind of job and even in that case, i'd rather pay
for people to implement features that are useful instead
of just following misunderstood userfriendlyness.

i agree that for the 'normal user' having programs in their
native language is helpful, but as soon as you start working
with science and numbers, native language and locale support
is more trouble for users than helping them and can even be
a recipe for desaster (what if some mission critical software
was developed and tested under one locale and is then installed 
and run on a machine with a different locale? there have been
precedents already!). of course this is a generic, world wide
problem and i can only urge everybody who is doing scientific
work on a machine with a different than the C locale to always
keep this problem in mind as a possible source of errors.

cheers,
   axel.

-- 
=======================================================================
Axel Kohlmeyer   akohlmey at cmm.chem.upenn.edu   http://www.cmm.upenn.edu
   Center for Molecular Modeling   --   University of Pennsylvania
Department of Chemistry, 231 S.34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6323
tel: 1-215-898-1582,  fax: 1-215-573-6233,  office-tel: 1-215-898-5425
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If you make something idiot-proof, the universe creates a better idiot.