Implement :currency function in the default registry

[aphillips]

Initial implementation of the :currency function.

This function will be standard in 2.0.

Note behavior differences from :number and :integer.

:unit is in #922.

[aphillips]

We agreed to take this in the 2024-11-04 call, provided the last changes were incorporated. This will fast-track, assuming I get positive reviews.

[eemeli]

This should be left out. This is novel currency formatting behaviour, and we should not be introducing it here via message formatting. Is this already somehow supported in ICU4J and ICU4C? If this makes sense for formatting currencies, wouldn't this also make sense for many other number formatting situations?

I do not object to a value like this in principle, but I object to it being introduced here.

[aphillips]

This value is supported by ICU.

The use cases for currencies are more common than for other number values (with the possible exception of units). Normally one is trying to get consistent widths (or one doesn't care). With currency values you generally want a specific number of fractional digits or no fraction digits. Mutation of the value to produce this is undesirable.

However, I agree that this is "special sauce" and shouldn't be required here. Should we introduce optional values?

[macchiati]

This is important for currencies.

As we discussed in the meeting, we should signal that for some of the options it is ok to use defaults if the underlying system doesn't support the choice.

[eemeli]

As we allow for implementations to support option values beyond the ones we explicitly define, the easiest way of making this optional is to leave it out for now. This would also more clearly allow for an implementation that did not support "hide if whole" fraction display to emit an error, rather than be required to fail silently.

This value is supported by ICU.

Could you give me a pointer to how/where this is supported? I could not find this myself.

[aphillips]

It's defined here: NumberFormatter.TrailingZeroDisplay

[aphillips]

I can add the separate option using the Intl spelling. Do you have a list of other options to add?

[eemeli]

We're missing the following, which could well be added in a separate PR:

• roundingPriority
  • auto (default)
  • morePrecision
  • lessPrecision
• roundingIncrement
  • 1 (default), 2, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, 100, 200, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 2500, and 5000
• roundingMode
  • ceil
  • floor
  • expand
  • trunc
  • halfCeil
  • halfFloor
  • halfExpand (default)
  • halfTrunc
  • halfEven

[aphillips]

I can't do this right this second, but will add these to this PR. Should they be optional or standard? I'm leaning towards standard.

Almost all of our work between now and 46.1 appears to be fixing up the registry/function set, plus some housekeeping.

[eemeli]

Should they be optional or standard?

I'm fine either way.

Almost all of our work between now and 46.1 appears to be fixing up the registry/function set, plus some housekeeping.

Good!

[aphillips]

Added. I made them standard.

@mihnita @catamorphism Please note this (proposed) change.

[eemeli]

I continue to object to using a different source for this one single function option, when all the other options for all the other functions are using TC39 Intl as their source. Using this set of option values unnecessarily breaks from our otherwise well established patterns.

[aphillips]

We discussed this in yesterday's call (which you weren't able to attend). The challenge here is that currency formatting has been greatly improved in CLDR (which is reflected by the changes in ICU) after Intl.NumberFormat was created. Those changes have not yet materialized in TC39, but really are needed. FWIW, there is continuing evolution here. To wit, there are a number of currencies with more than one symbol (some of which are formal and some of which are variant). These symbols need to be selectable and, when selected, can result in different formatting patterns.

The poster child for this is the Turkish Lira, which has a newfangled symbol, which displays on the left thusly: ₺123.456,79 , but which is very often rendered using the older ASCII symbol "TL":

The discussion yesterday recognized that there are more options here than in Intl, but that implementations are only required to accept all these keywords--not to provide different results based on them. Intl provides code, symbol, narrowSymbol, and name. We could reasonably rename thusly:

Proposed Above	Intl Equivalent	Suggested	Comments
narrow	narrowSymbol	narrow	No need to be extra verbose
short	symbol	symbol	(default) symbol is consistent with user expectations
full	name	name	ICU's name is actually FULL_NAME. Can be misleading, e.g. JPY renders as 123,457円
iso	code	code	code might be better because some codes are not ISO4217
formal	n/a	formal	Variations such as TRD => NT$
variant	n/a	variant	Variations such as the TRY one illustrated above
none	n/a	none	Frequently used for columns of currency values

Would that rename work for you?

[macchiati]

The rename looks good.

Side note: we should look at having documentation of the equivalent options for Intl and ICU (maybe others). Perhaps on the site rather than the spec.

[aphillips]

I did the rename just now (in bbc7091) but am looking for @eemeli's feedback

[eemeli]

As we allow for implementations to support option values beyond the ones we explicitly define, the easiest way of making this optional is to leave it out for now. This would also more clearly allow for an implementation that did not support "hide if whole" fraction display to emit an error, rather than be required to fail silently.

This value is supported by ICU.

Could you give me a pointer to how/where this is supported? I could not find this myself.

[macchiati]

So to recap, https://cldr-smoke.unicode.org/spec/main/ldml/tr35.html#UnicodeCurrencyIdentifier defines the validity precisely, but is squishy about the well-formedness.

• The valid values are those name attribute values in the type elements of key name="cu" in bcp47/currency.xml.

As to well-formedness, instead of

Codes consisting of 3 ASCII letters that are or have been valid ...

It should say:

Well-formed codes are of the form [A-Z]{3}.
The valid codes are or have been valid ...

(The second sentence is a description of how the valid values were derived, not the definition.)

Let me see about getting the TC to add this to the PR I already have for spec changes in 46.1

[eemeli]

My blocking objections to this PR have now been resolved. I would still prefer for the last three currencyDisplay option values to be left out, but I can live with them being included.

[eemeli]

A somewhat dormant issue exists for adding at least "formal" to JS: tc39/ecma402#643

I'm not really sure about "variant", or what it's a variant of. Looking at the data, it looks like these are for the most part abbreviations, stored as <symbol alt="variant">. Would therefore "variantSymbol" maybe make more sense? That also more clearly implies what the fallback behaviour might be if a variant is not available (as is most often the case).

I have no opinions about "none" or "hidden", as neither is available in JS and neither term is used in any of the existing JS formatters.

Overall, I would prefer to leave out these option values, but I don't strongly object to them either.

Ping @sffc and @ryzokuken about this, in case you have thoughts on these. As is, we'll need to special-case the handling for this one option in the JS spec, and the values chosen here may end up influencing the corresponding ones for Intl.NumberFormat.

[aphillips]

The variant symbols are often "abbreviation-like", but they really are alternate symbols. The recent fad of creating custom currency symbols unique to a specific currency to some degree corresponds with these symbols. The relationship with formal is kind of unclear. It's a bit clunky, TBH (you can't tell if a currency has a variant and specifying variant in the pattern depends on the currency of the value to some degree).

[eemeli]

Is the fallback behaviour for formatting currencies with no variant documented somewhere?

[macchiati]

Yes, the fallback for each element with alt=... is documented. It is normally the unmarked element (ie, without the alt=...), but in some documented cases (notably locale display names) it may be constructed.

[aphillips]

Note that variant is restricted (currently) to currency symbols.

The usability problem is that when a user writes the source message, she's not going to know about the need for variant. At Amazon, our currency formatter had enums for the presentation format ("in sentence", "standalone", "compact", "iso code", and such) that correspond to specific user interface use cases. Various locale/currency/site configurations then produced the correct symbol/pattern in each of these. This was helpful because it let us do one thing with (e.g.) TRY in the Türkiye site and different thing elsewhere without the developer (or translator) having to know whether a variant existed and, further, whether it was desired or not. Often "what to do" will depend entirely on which currency and which presentation case is wanted ☹️

The enums here are taken from NumberFormatter (and Intl.NumberFormat), which are procedural APIs for getting this effect. They are wrong for MessageFormat, I think, because MF is supposed to hide procedural gorp like that. As currently speced, the developer has to want the variant symbol all the time (unlikely) or the translator has to put it there (possibly at odds with the display use case) for specific locales (and not generally knowing the currency). You don't want to have to ever write:

.local $curCode = {$amount :get field=currency}
.match $curCode
TRY {{You have {$amount :currency currencyDisplay=variant} left in your account.}}
UAH {{You have {$amount :currency currencyDisplay=variant} left in your account.}}
NTD {{You have {$amount :currency currencyDisplay=formal} left in your account.}}
*   {{You have {$mount :currency} left in your account.}}