[Python-Dev] PEP 540: Add a new UTF-8 mode (v2)

[Nick Coghlan]

On 6 December 2017 at 15:59, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 4:46 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Something I've just noticed that needs to be clarified: on Linux, "C"
>> locale and "POSIX" locale are aliases, but this isn't true in general
>> (e.g. it's not the case on *BSD systems, including Mac OS X).
>
> For those of us with little to no BSD/MacOS experience, can you give a
> quick run-down of the differences between "C" and "POSIX"?

The one that's relevant to default locale detection is just the string
that "setlocale(LC_CTYPE, NULL)" returns.

On Linux (or, more accurately, with glibc), after setting
"LC_CTYPE=POSIX", that call still returns "C" (since the "POSIX"
locale is defined as an alias for the "C" locale).

By contrast, on *BSD, it will return "POSIX" (since "POSIX" is
actually a distinct locale there).

Beyond that, I don't know what the actual functional differences are.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia