[R] Locales and Windows

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

Charles Raux raised the problem of having object names with accented chars
in.  This is supposed to work, but depends on the machine being set to a
locale that allows accented chars, and knowing correctly which they are.

Windows being what it is, this is a problem.  It seems that with the
standard runtime crtdll.dll that rw1011 uses, Windows 9x does not know
about locales, whereas NT does but does not get the details right.

It is also possible to compile R against msvcrt.dll, and we are proposing
to use that from rw1020 on.  That appears to use locales correctly on both
Windows 98 and NT (at least on my machines).  I have compiled R-1.1.1
against msvcrt.dll, and made a replacement set of DLLs available.
These should just drop in over an unpacked copy of rw1011.

First some warnings:

1) This is not an official release, and the version header identifies it as
separate version.  Please don't file bugs against this one.

2) You need msvcrt.dll installed, which W98/NT/2000 machines will have but
W95 machines may not. If you need it, see the Rtools portal (and for that
read readme.packages).

3) Be prepared to reinstall rw1011 if this does not work.  Better,
unpack this over a copy.

4) Sorting is still in ASCII for this version.  (There are problems with
Windows' idea of locale-specific collation.)

5) R 1.2.0 will have ways to change locales: this does not, and you
are probably stuck with your system's basic locale.


Get

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/RWin/rw1011msvc.zip

and unzip it in ...\rw1011.

I will be interested to hear of experiences: please send any more public
discussion to R-devel rather than R-help.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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