3.8 and french (and locales)

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sun Jun 5 19:09:39 UTC 2005


Most of that spec sounds good, although it is overkill for the question
at hand the language by itself would work.  All we need is a stupid
primLanguage function that has a fallback to an image-level preference. 
This might make a great hacking session on #squeak some time if you can
gather VM hackers for at least two platforms.

Regarding the spec, though, the timezone interface sounds fishy.  It is
reporting an offset, but the offset changes over time.  So, (a) you have
to call the offset primitive every time you want to do any timezone
computation, and (b) even then there is a race condition, and the offset
might change between the time you query it and the time you use it. 
Sure you will usually win this race, but is it a good idea to *design*
an unavoidable race condition into the spec?

It seems better to go to one of two extremes.  Either have the VM handle
timezones, and thus the "DateAndTime now" primitive returns a time plus
its offset to UTC, or have full timezone support in the image instead of
trying to do it halfway.  David Lewis has done work on this latter angle
if you want to go in that direction.




-Lex



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