Fwd: Re: Internal number storage

["Moe Elzubeir" <Elzubeir at cobaf dot coba dot unt dot edu>]

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• To: <qt-interest at trolltech dot com>
• Subject: Re: Internal number storage
• From: David Dunham <dunham at mac dot com>
• Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 15:50:22 -0800

On Friday, January 25, 2002, at 03:13 , Moe Elzubeir wrote:

For example, in Arabic, some Arab countries use the Hindi
number system, and others use the Arabic numerals (thankfully). When
writing an application, should the numbers be stored in their ASCII
encoding,
and then rendered to either Hindi or Arabic at the option of the user,
or should it be stored as Hindi numbers (internally) and then have the
user choose between the Arabic numerals vs. Hindi numerals?

That's kind of an interesting question.

I think in general you'll want to store numbers as numbers, i.e. not in Unicode (there are after all no Hindi numerals in ASCII). This not only lets you localize to different writing systems, but also to other formats. For example, most Americans write "one million" as "1,000,000" but many Europeans write "1.000.000" (and I think the British use "1,000,000,000" -- oh wait, it's "one billion" they don't understand :-).

David Dunham     A Sharp     david at a-sharp dot com
Voice/Fax: 206 783 7404     http://a-sharp.com
Efficiency is intelligent laziness.

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