Re: Numbers representation in French

[Bruno Haible]

Jérôme Decoodt wrote:
> I think there is an error in $1.3 Aspects in Native Language Support in
> http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_mono/gettext.html
> In French, numbers have a space as thousand separator is the number is
> greater than 9999 (like 42 127).

Hello,

There are web pages using the space as a thousands separator, like [1],
and others, like [2], using no thousands separator. It indeed looks like the
majority opinion in France is to use a space as thousands separator.

Since the french locale (fr_FR) in GNU libc has


LC_MONETARY
...
mon_decimal_point         "<U002C>"
mon_thousands_sep         "<U0020>"
mon_grouping              3;3
...
END LC_MONETARY

LC_NUMERIC
decimal_point             "<U002C>"
thousands_sep             ""
grouping                  0;0
END LC_NUMERIC


it appears that glibc is wrong here: it should have

LC_NUMERIC
decimal_point             "<U002C>"
thousands_sep             "<U0020>"
grouping                  3;3
END LC_NUMERIC

Since you probably have more authoritative sources about how to write
numbers in French than I do, would you mind submitting a bug report about
the fr_FR locale, at http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/ ?

Bruno

[1] 
http://www.paris.fr/portail/accueil/Portal.lut?page_id=5427&document_type_id=5&document_id=8718&portlet_id=11661
[2] 
http://www.seinemaritime.net/guide-des-aides-aide-a-la-realisation-de-travaux-184-T1_D_1_1_1.html