Re: [BUG] fractional bin sizes do not work in some locales (e.g., de_DE.UTF-8)

[Tim Rice]

Hey Erik,

> IMHO this is the bug, i.e., operation parsing is neither locale
> aware nor locale agnostic.  My preferred fix would be to make
> operation parsing locale aware, for consistency.

+1

Another idea that occurred to me is to add new flags such as --bin-width. It wouldn't 
exactly solve the problem, and there might be aesthetic reasons to dislike a new flag 
like this; on the other hand, it would more easily "do the right thing."


> > I have a local implementation of this.  It does not break any
> > of the tests and enables specifying fractional binning bucket
> > sizes when using a German locale:
> >
> >     $ LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 ./datamash bin:0.1 1 <<<1,15
> >     1,1
> >
> > What do you think?
>
> I intend not to follow this approach, because it would make
> actually fixing the localization bug an incompatible change.

Acknowledged.


> IMHO disabling localization for the operation parser would
> need to be gated via option, with the intent to keep this
> option even after fixing the localization bug.

I'm conscious of standing too close to the trees and not seeing the forest. It 
might pay to step back and think about would should options really look like, 
in general? Once we establish a universal principal which can hold for all 
types of options, the bin operation should naturally fall into line.

~ Tim