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prePEP: Money data type

Batista, Facundo FBatista at uniFON.com.ar
Mon Oct 20 17:05:35 EDT 2003 
Alex Martelli wrote:

#- > The problem is that decimalSeparator and thousandSeparator 
#- are important
#- > to parse the string in the constructor (if I need str() to 
#- give me a ','
#- > as decimal point, I also need to supply a ',' as decimal 
#- point to the
#- > constructor).
#- 
#- Hmmm, I see your point.  But, in general, parsing '1.000' would be
#- ambiguous -- is it one thousand with '.' as the thousandSeparator or
#- one in a currency which requires three decimal digits?

Dependes of the values of thousandSeparator and decimalSeparator. If you
overload them:

	thousandSeparator = '.'
	decimalSeparator = '.'

the behaviour is unpredictable (should I generate an exception or
something?)


#- See?  After I called setlocale to set it to the user locale (rather
#- than the neutral 'C' locale), 'en_US' in my case, I got lot of info
#- in the dict that locale.localeconv() returns: money decimal point is
#- '.', fractional-parts-digits are 2 for both base and 
#- internationalized
#- formatting, thousands separator is comma for both ordinary and money
#- amounts, the currency symbol is '$' in base use but 'USD' for fully
#- internationalized used, etc, etc.

...

#- The base class Money seem to need just a few of these to be able to
#- parse strings (I would not use them for default output with either
#- repr or str, although maybe a non-special method such as 'format'
#- MIGHT, for the user's convenience, emit a string formatted by such
#- guidelines -- I'm neutral, say +0, on the latter).

I was using to parse the input and to build the output, the elements
thousandSeparator, decimalSeparator and currencySymbol. This can be very
easily overloaded, but the default was MY taste.

Seems a lot better to make the default based in locale.

Why doesn't like to you to 

>>> m = Money(23.3, 2)
>>> print m
$23.30

?

.	Facundo
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