bug#51011: [GNU sort] Numerical sort with delimiter may be broken (bug)

[Pádraig Brady]

On 09/10/2021 04:48, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 10/8/21 7:32 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> > it's not a thousands separator, rather a grouping
> > character,
> > and groups can be in 2, 3, 4, and even 5.
>
> Sure, but 'sort' could determine the group sizes from the locale, and
> reject digit strings that are formatted improperly according to the
> group-size rules. (Not that I plan to write the code to do that....)

Yes I agree that would be better, but not worth it I think
as there would still be ambiguity in what was a grouping char
and what was a field separator. Also that ambiguity would
now vary across locales.

Another possible change which I'd prefer TBH
would be to disable the grouping separator, or decimal point
if they overlapped with --field-separator.
Doing this would induce a warning from --debug also.

cheers,
Pádraig