decimal point vs. comma

[Bohdan Milar]

Hi,

I use gawk to process several accounting books with thousands of 
entries. Everything went well until 3.1.3 where (as I found in the NEWS 
file) "Gawk now follows POSIX in handling of local numeric formats for
input, output and number/string conversions".

But this brought many problems, not only for me. I use Czech locales 
where offical decimal separator is "," and not ".", but for many reasons 
"." is commonly used (including the accounting operations). So now my 
Bash script for accounting analyses does not work correctly, e.g.

echo "sss 12.5 2.5" |awk '{print $2+$3}'
14

:-(

In addition gawk uses different rules for external and internal formats. 
So if I want to do 12,5 + 3,5 I must write

echo "sss 12,5" |awk '{print $2+2.5}'
15

because

echo "sss 12,5" |awk '{print $2+2,5}'
14,5 5

and

echo "sss 12.5" |awk '{print $2+2.5}'
14,5

I think this is not correct. I would prefer my software behaving 
consistently. I suppose to add a --locale parametr or something like 
that to turn on that strange behaviour and let default values on the 
previous state. I also need the compatibility with older systems where 
newer versions of Gawk have not yet been ported, but I use my script on 
them.

Best regards,

Bohdan Milar
Liberix
http:/www.liberix.cz