[PLUG] env LANG=C -resolved

[Carla Schroder]

LANG=C does mean language = the C programming language. As several of you 
said. The missing link for me was what the heck does that have to do with 
locale? Well duh, C itself is written in ASCII. So 'env LANG=C' literally 
means 'turn off localization', though the end result is similar to setting 
the locale as American English. Technically, it's not the same as 'env 
LANG=en_US', because that is setting a locale, rather than turning it off. 
But to the beleagured end user who just wants their screen fonts to not look 
bizarre, it's the same.

This is an issue because of the move towards internationalization with 
Unicode. Many legacy apps do not support Unicode, so when they run in a 
Unicode environment like Red Hat 8, interesting glitches appear. Some of them 
go beyond cosmetic, for example if filenames are encoded in in the encoding 
of the locale this creates most interesting complications. (UTF-8 is the 
ASCII-compatible Unicode encoding, found in RH8 and other *nixes.)

Never a dull moment.

__
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Carla Schroder
Bratgrrl Computing
www.bratgrrl.com
This message brought to you by
Red Hat 8 and Kmail
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~