Re: setlocale

[Paul Eggert]

Ben Pfaff <address@hidden> writes:

> Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Simon Josefsson wrote:
>>> Why can we assume setlocale exists?
>>> Is it POSIX?
>>
>> Even more: It's specified by ISO C 99.
>
> Even more than that: it's in C90 also.

Yes, that's the key point: it was in ISO C90 aka ANSI C89.  But even
more than that: setlocale was in XPG3, and therefore in SunOS 4
(introduced 1989, last shipped to customers on 1998-09-30), which for
many years was the oldest Unix that could conceivably be a target of
modern GNU apps.  You have to go back to something like SVR3
(introduced 1986, probably last shipped to customers around 1990) to
find a system that lacks setlocale, but SVR3 is 100% dead now.

Theoretically we might still have problem with setlocale, since
freestanding C implementations are not required to supply setlocale or
<locale.h> -- this is true even for C99.  But if this turns into a
real problem, we can write a setlocale module that supplies a no-op
substitute.