[Python-Dev] Idea: emulating _locale

[Greg Stein]

On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 12:25:08PM +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>...
> Peter Funk wrote:
>...
> > > + ### C lib locale APIs
> > > +
> > > + from _locale import *
> > 
> > Wouldn't it be clever to provide some dummy stubs on those platforms, where
> > the _locale module was not enabled?
> > 
> > try:
> >     from _locale import *
> > except:
> >     def setlocale(....
> >     def localeconv(....
> >     ...
> > 
> > Especially the MacOS 1.5.2 release provided by Jack Jansen was
> > compiled without '_locale'.  And at least in Python 1.6a2 '_locale'
> > is still disabled per default in 'Modules/Setup.in'.  I didn't had
> > a look into the current CVS though, so this may have changed.
> > 
> > I think the name aliasing tables might be also useful on those
> > systems lacking locale support in their C-library.
> 
> setlocale and localeconv are ANSI C and Python requires an ANSI C
> compiler, so there should be no problem (at least in theory).
> 
> If there is a problem, adding the missing symbols would
> be no problem: the APIs could always report locale 'C'
> and its numeric settings.

An ANSI C compiler and the ANSI C library are very different. Just because
Python requires an ANSI compiler (or close to it), does NOT mean that we can
or should depend upon particular elements in the library.

IMO, we should follow Peter's advice and have stubs for the platforms where
_locale is not built.

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/