Language warning.

Via the SG16 Slack, this commit message from the mpv-player repository (November 2017).

C locales were utterly moronic even when they were invented. The locale (via setlocale) is global state, and global state is not a reasonable way to do anything. […]

On top of that, setting a locale randomly changes the semantics of a bunch of standard functions. If a function respects locale, you suddenly can’t rely on it to behave the same on all systems. Some behavior can come as a surprise, and of course it will be dependent on the region of the user (it doesn’t help that most software is US-centric, and the US locale is almost like the C locale, i.e. almost what you expect).

Idiotically, locales were not just used to define the current character encoding, but the concept was used for a whole lot of things, like e. g. whether numbers should use , or . as decimal separator. The latter issue is actually much worse, because it breaks basic string conversion […]

He’s right, you know.