Look at us rambling about “.” vs. “,” like two old fishwifes. I picture @dreev just shaking his head when he sees this and quietly closing the tab.
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To the contrary, this is my kind of pedantry! My rough sense is that (for now) Beeminder should just stick to periods as radix and avoid commas as much as possible. Definitely a bug that the iOS app (in some locales) doesn’t give you a way to enter a period!
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Allow me to throw in one last thought that might help refine that rough sense:
By enforcing a specific decimal separator you make a point about that specific locale (language, culture, …) being inherently relevant to the function of the app.
Is there anything in the Beeminder app that would warrant that? What in the app is so specific to countries where periods are used as decimal separator? Why would the app even want to worry about this?
If the answers are all no, nothing, no idea then please consider freeing yourself (read: the app) from these specifics. Do not make this your problem. Let the runtime do its job and handle that. In the end isn’t all that Beeminder should care about some IEEE float value?
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Why does the app not accept a comma in the first place? Either the field is hardcoded to accept only periods instead of localized radices, or the field doesn’t correctly get the locale information.
I’m just pointing this out not because I think we’d not be on the same page (quite the contrary) but because nothing is as permanent as the temporary.
(Also I really wanted to make this pun)
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I think @phi’s point is that the missing period is not a bug, because in that locale decimals are properly entered with a comma, and apps should read decimals in locale-dependent ways. It’s no more a bug than it is for German keyboards to have umlauts and eszeds on them.
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Right, that’s the Right Thing ™ but I’m speculating it will be more expedient to first patch the problem by making sure that keyboard just always has a period. Properly internationalizing Beeminder, even for such a seemingly small thing as radix, is just not on the roadmap very soon.
Btw, this is @apb’s code so he may be able to tell us if the keyboard thing sounds like an easy fix. Also it’s open source – https://github.com/beeminder/beeswift – if anyone else wants to make a pull request for this!
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Is the Android source available?