Dozenal

Very preliminary dozenal locale implementation for Java.

What is Dozenal?

Dozenal is one of the popularised names for a positional number system using twelve as the base. Proponents of the dozenal system claim that it is superior to decimal because many common fractions are more neatly represented in dozenal.

For example:

• 1/3 = 0.4
• 1/4 = 0.3
• 1/5 = 0.24972497...
• 1/6 = 0.2

For this project I intend to use the Unicode ↊ for ten/dec and ↋ for eleven/el.

Design Outline

LocaleServiceProvider allows one to register new locales.

There appears to be no particular reason that numbers have to be formatted in base ten, therefore it should be possible to slot in a provider for a locale where people use a different radix.

Usage

Put the jar somewhere in java.ext.dirs or on the boot classpath via -Xbootclasspath/a:.

Then, run Java with additional system properties to set the locale:

-Duser.language=en
-Duser.country=US
-Duser.variant=DOZ
-Djava.locale.providers=SPI,JRE

Other variations might work too.

Calls to NumberFormat.getNumberInstance, NumberFormat.getIntegerInstance, NumberFormat.getPercentInstance and the like will now format in dozenal.

Caveats

Not all Java programmers know that the best way to format numbers is via NumberFormat. So if you intend to slap this on an application and get it in dozenal, expect to encounter the following:

• Calls to String.format passing numbers into format strings with %d which bypass NumberFormat for some reason (they don't have to - JDK please improve this)
• Calls to String.valueOf passing numbers
• Calls to Integer.toString, Float.toString and friends
• Numbers being concatenated directly onto strings
• Hardcoded usages of DecimalFormat

All of these can be replaced with calls which go via the SPI using various techniques, but it's a long road ahead, and a lot of education on how to use the standard libraries will be required.