id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	difficulty
1322	Locale can influence how CHICKEN reads numbers	sjamaan		"Because CHICKEN uses the libc `strtol`/`strtoll` and `strtod` functions when reading flonums and fixnums, locale settings may influence how CHICKEN reads numbers, especially in `decode_literal`.

Hugo Arregui provided the following simple test:

{{{
;; Compile this with the -embedded option, since it defines its own main()
(import chicken scheme foreign)

#>
#include <locale.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
   setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, ""es_AR.UTF-8"");
   CHICKEN_run(C_toplevel);
   return 0;
}
<#

(return-to-host)
}}}

This fails because the runtime system has several encoded floating-point numbers, which will no longer be read correctly.  Also note that `strtod` might incorrectly ""parse"" a floating-point number like `1.002` if it happens to be valid in the current locale using thousands separators.

Parsing floating-point numbers in C is going to be pretty damn tricky, so we might just try and use `setlocale()` to set the locale to `C` and restore it to whatever it was before after doing so.  I have no idea what the effects are of calling these functions often in the same program, and if there's a performance impact (it might be loading the strings or formatting rules for this locale every single time, on the fly, since it'll be designed for ""normal"" programs in which `setlocale()` will be called only a handful of times)

See also https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/5988 for example"	defect	closed	major	4.12.0	core libraries	4.11.0	wontfix	number parsing		hard