On Saturday 22 March 2008 14:51:45 victor wrote:
> It has come to my attention that Csound has a potentially
> problematic issue with orc/score parsing related to
> the use of strtod(). I'll summarise the best I can:
>
> 1. This issue has popped up when using the Python
> wrappers and the GTK library (PyGTK) on Linux in
> the XO computer
>
> 2. The importing of the GTK module seems to change the
> default locale.

IMO this is a very grave bug in GTK's part. There is absolutely no reason for 
a library to change the locale. Has this been reported there?

>
> 3. strtod() in otran.c line 883 fails to translate real numeric
> constants and the "numeric syntax" message is issued.
> Compilation fails.
>
> 4. Other calls to strtod() in libcsound might also fail. I came
> across one such failure in linevent.c line 301.
>
> 5. The interim solution has been to call
> locale.setlocale(LC_ALL, "C") to set the locale back to "C"
> before compilation (this is a wrapper to the c function
> setlocale()).

It would be nice to check which specific env var affects strtod's behaviour. 
LC_ALL is just a shortcut to set all LC_* variables. I guess that LC_CTYPE, 
LC_NUMERIC or LC_COLLATE are the variables that may change it.

>
> The question is: should we fix this inside the Csound library?
> How should we be dealing with this issue?

If the exact variable can be narrowed down, it could be set at compile time: 
store the old value, set the C locale, compile, restore the old value.

>
> Victor



-- 
Felipe Sateler