On 2008-09-17, Mauricio
Localized reading should be somewhere else, perhaps related to Locales.
No! If we had that, string from a program would not be readable by some program running in other machine, or other locale. As, actually, you describe below. Show and Read are for programs reading, not for user reading. That's a work for Pango :)
UI can be done with text, and in any case includes text and there should be some nice way to localize that. The locale system is the standard way to do that on Unix. These strings are not meant for program-to-program communication, whereas read and show are. IMAO, it's bloody well stupid to use commas for either the decimal separator or the thousands separator, as it has a well established role in separating the items in a list that conflicts with this. While a thousands separator can improve readability, it's not strictly necessary. OTOH, a decimal separator is necessary. As the comma's not usable, that leaves us with the decimal point, and no thousands separator. Lo and behold, that's exactly what Haskell uses. -- Aaron Denney -><-