[Insight-developers] ITK and I18N

[Bill Lorensen]

Folks,

Recent activity on the vtk users mailing list has highlighted the
vulnerability that vtk and itk have to internationalization (i18n)
software engineering issues. I ran an experiment where I changed the
default locale to "french" in the itkTestMain.h test driver. In
Testing/Code/IO 49 of 204 tests failed. The failures all had to do
with the representation of floating point numbers. The "french" locale
(and many others) use "," as a decimal point rather than ".".

I have some solutions but have not checked in the changes yet. I want
to bring this to the attention of itk developers so that we can come
up with a proper solution.

BTW, Tom Vercauteren has been workling on another i18n issue regarding
file names.

I have started a wiki page:
http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK_Policy_and_Procedures_for_Internationalization
to describe the i18n issue with the hops that we can produce policies
and procedures for making itk a more robust, international toolkit.

Let's continue the discussion on this mailing list.

Bill