Internationalisation, setlocale()

[Bob Goudreau]

In article <7513 at paperboy.OSF.ORG>, martin at osf.osf.org (Sandra Martin) writes:
> 
> The problem is that there are no current standards for locale names or for
> the way locale information should be organized. Most implementations that I
> know of use some form of the X/Open naming recommendation which consists of
> three parts:
> 
> 	language_territory.codeset
> 
> At this point, however, there is no agreement about the contents of the
> individual parts. For example, some implementations might use "long" country
> names for the the territory segment (e.g., canada, germany), while others use
> abbreviations (can, ger). Still others use the nationality rather than the
> country name (e.g., using "swiss" rather than "switzerland"). There are many,
> many other examples of different approaches.
>
> ....
> 
> Confused? I wouldn't be surprised if you were. I've thought for a long time
> that it would be a good idea to have some standards for locale names, but
> have been voted down in a couple of different groups. However, lately 
> there have been some rumblings about the confusion inherent in the current
> chaotic system, so we may see some standards soon. Standards for the
> organization of locale info also would be helpful.

And to open a whole separate can of worms, what about the different
ways to name a country or a language?  E.g., "germany" vs. "deutschland",
or "English" vs. "Englisch" vs. "Anglais" vs. "Ingles", etc.  It would
appear to be necessary to introduce many separate standards of locale
names (each naming all locales), one for each language locale!  Of course,
the character set(s) used to form such names is yet another problem....

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