On 18 Sep 2008, at 3:20 am, Mauricio wrote:
Agree about the answer, not about the question. The correct one would be "is it possible to change haskell syntax to support the international notation (not any locally sensitive one) for decimal real numbers? Would a change in 'read' be a good first step?"
For some sense of "possible", the answer is clearly yes. However, it is perhaps misleading to call commas "THE international notation". The plain fact of the matter is that whatever any standards body may say, there are MANY notations for numbers. You might as well ask "is it possible to change Haskell syntax to support only the *real* Arabic digits ... for ... numbers". The Arabic script is used in many countries, so it's international. I don't read Arabic letters at all, but to me numbers written in Arabic script are no weirder than numbers using commas instead of dots. I would draw readers' attention to http://engineers.ihs.com/news/2006/nist-decimal-international.htm which says that (1) China, India, and Japan use decimal points, not commas. (2) There was a resolution of the CGPM in 2003 "endorsing the use of the point on the line as a decimal sign". (3) In June 2006, ISO agreed to allow the use of dots as decimal points in international standards. As it happens, the decimal point character I greatly prefer is the traditional British raised dot, but I can live with a low dot. I am 100% behind internationalised input and output, but allowing commas in numbers inside programming languages that already use commas for other purposes is, let's be polite, not a terribly good idea. You could probably get away with it in Lisp, but how many numbers are there in (1,2,3)? One thing that definitely is missing from Haskell numbers, and which I greatly miss, is a "thousands separator". Ada got around the dot/comma/apostrophe/whatever issue for thousands separators by using the underscore. For an unsigned decimal integer, this means allowing [0-9](_?[0-9])* instead of [0-9]+. It works really well, despite not being ANYBODY's cultural convention.
I know this looks difficult, but I'm sure it deserves at least some thinking. We have previous examples for less important issues: ghc does accept Windows end of line conventions, the minus and sign needs special syntax, and '.' can be used as decimal separator even if it's use as function notation.
Best, Maurício
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