From jan@swi.psy.uva.nl  Tue Jun 13 11:04:24 2000
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From: Jan Wielemaker <jan@swi.psy.uva.nl>
Organization: SWI, University of Amsterdam
To: "Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok@atlas.otago.ac.nz>, pjb@imaginet.fr,
        prolog@swi.psy.uva.nl
Subject: Re: Suggestion regarding the classification of the characters.
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 11:00:00 +0200
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On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>The intent of C/UNIX locales and their aspects such as LC_ALL
>LC_MESSAGES LC_MONETARY LC_COLLATE LC_TIME LC_NUMERIC LC_CTYPE
>is so that a program can adapt its *data* handling.
>
>To set the *syntax* of the programming language from the locale
>is a bad idea.  There are plenty of excellent reasons why Quintus
>Prolog decoupled its data character classification predicates
>from its syntax tables.

That is exactly what happens in SWI-Prolog.  char_type and code_type
build in the C-locale functions (appearently not correctly, we Dutch
are a bad testbed for this as most of us use ASCII with an US keyboard,
but that is another issue).  These functions are intended for
applications to process data.  The SWI-Prolog parser (as defined by
read_term/3 and friends) uses its own classification.

	Regards --- Jan

