> They should always work
> according to the local settings on each computer.

No, I am very glad InterBase itself strictly adheres to a standard format
with no respect to any locale settings.

The only way FB/IB could do what you are talking about here is if it kept
track of each client's locale settings. This would cause a tremendous burden
to get this all coded into the parsing routines of the engine. This would
burden performance and introduce a whole crop of potential bugs in the
server code. Also, this would become a severe nightmare for 3+ tier systems
who use connection pooling for a whole multitude of clients with any variety
of locale settings. Then you would have to have it be able to change
locale's for existing connections and middle tiers would have to bloat their
packet information to include a plethora of locale context related
information.

In short, let's keep client locale out of the database server. This is the
job of middleware like IBO, ODBC, ADO, etc. to iron out these kinks.

Regards,
Jason Wharton
CPS - Mesa AZ
http://www.ibobjects.com