Poetic decimals not working in standalone Linux interpreter

[flesser]

This example code from https://codewithrockstar.com/docs/03-variables.html#poetic-literals does not work as expected in the Linux standalone interpreter:

My heart was like ice... a life unfulfilled, wakin' everybody up, taking booze and pills.
Say it.

e is like my… darkest nightmarish longings, my cravings, a symphony of suff'ring that lasts life-long.
Say it.

Using ./rockstar from rockstar-v2.0.31-linux-x64.tar.gz the output is:

31415926535
2718281828459

Expected output as per the docs and https://codewithrockstar.com/online should be

3.1415926535
2.718281828459

Neither form of ellipsis (... nor …) seems to be interpreted as decimal point by the offline interpreter.

[dylanbeattie]

That's very odd, for a couple of reasons... first, the web, macOS, Linux, etc. distributions are all built from the same source code, and second, the GitHub workflow that produces the WASM and Linux binaries is running on Linux, so all the tests and examples, including that one, are run on Linux as part of building a new release.

What Linux distro are you running? And what do you get if divide, say, 1 / 3 using the interactive interpreter?

dylan@amethyst:~/rockstar-linux-x64-binary$ ./rockstar
Rockstar v2.0.31 on linux-x64.
Type 'exit' to exit.
» let x be 1 / 3
« 0.3333333333333333333333333333
» shout x
0.3333333333333333333333333333
« 0.3333333333333333333333333333
»

[flesser]

I'm running Ubuntu 24.10 with kernel Linux 5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2 #1 SMP Tue Nov 5 00:21:55 UTC 2024 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux (WSL2 under Windows 11)

Division, both interactive and via source file works as it should:

Rockstar v2.0.31 on linux-x64.
Type 'exit' to exit.
» let x be 1 / 3
« 0.3333333333333333333333333333
» shout x
0.3333333333333333333333333333
« 0.3333333333333333333333333333
»

[flesser]

Output of ./rockstar -p test.rock:

assign:
  variable: My heart
  value:
    poetic number: 31415926535 [ice...a life unfulfilled wakin' everybody up taking booze and pills]
output:
  lookup:
    pronoun: it
assign:
  variable: e
  value:
    poetic number: 2718281828459 [my…darkest nightmarish longings my cravings a symphony of suff'ring that lasts life-long]
output:
  lookup:
    pronoun: it

/edit1: Looks like the spaces after ... are missing?

/edit2: Hm, but the online interpreter's Parse function displays it without space, too

[dylanbeattie]

Try this in the command line interpreter?

» x is like aaaa... aaaa aaaa
« 4.44
» y is 10
« 10
» x / y
« 0.444
»

I'm trying to figure out if this is likely to be a parser problem, an encoding problem (Unicode ellipsis might be doing something weird with byte order marking), or something else.

[dylanbeattie]

Another question... what language/culture is your system running, and what should a decimal separator look like? Decimal output just falls back to the .NET ToString() methods, which might be picking up regional/locale settings on your machine (and possibly not picking up the right ones because i18n between Windows and Linux is still a bit wobbly especially where things like WSL2 are concerned)

[flesser]

Yes, that seems to be the issue! My system is running in German, where . (dot) is a thousands separator and , (comma) is used as decimal separator (1.234.567,89).

./rockstar debug.rock 
3141

LANG=en_UK ./rockstar debug.rock
3.141

LANG=de_DE ./rockstar debug.rock
3141

The locals are to blame, with their commas and their dots...
now the parser is crying and my programs are shot!

[dylanbeattie]

Ha. Yeah, that's exactly it - the Rockstar grammar reduces any decimal separator to a . and then runs it through .NET decimal.TryParse()

Fix is to specify a parsing culture on this line:

https://github.com/RockstarLang/rockstar/blob/main/Starship/Rockstar.Engine/rockstar.peg#L464

I'll get to it next time I'm doing a livestream; that'll be a fun one to share with the viewers.