Re: [Gretl-users] locale related bug ?

On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, [ISO-8859-1] Patricio Cuar�n wrote: I made one further update a couple of hours ago. One of the recent changes affected "set force_decpoint on/off" so let me explain. The original intent behind this was strictly to give users in a locale other than "C"/English the choice of using the decimal dot (set force_decpoint on) or the locale decimal separator, which for many non-English locales is the comma (set force_decpoint off). What I didn't notice at first is that if you're in a locale other than "C" but you force gretl to use English (either via the GUI language selector or the --english command-line option), the "force_decpoint" setting could have a somewhat odd effect: if you set it "off" you got the decimal comma (if you're in a locale that uses the comma). This seems wrong: English with a decimal comma is a weird hybrid; use of English should imply the decimal dot. And that is now the case in CVS -- I think. One other point to note is that regardless of the locale, and regardless of any gretl options, on input in scripts or the console you must _always_ use the decimal dot. This is by design and is meant to enforce compatibility across scripts. You'll always get an error if you do scalar x = 0,1 (or if you don't get an error, it's a bug). On the other hand, in GUI dialogs with simple numerical entries we try (a) to accept the decimal dot in all cases, but (b) also to accept the decimal comma if it is used in the locale. Allin Cottrell