VALUE - what to do with "." and ","?

The VALUE function takes a string and returns a number.  If it gets "," or "." in a regular number, what should it do?

In short: Do we require "C" locale interpretation of Numbers for VALUE? Is it locale-dependent?  Does it try "C" locale first, and then a locale if that fails?

What do current implementations, including Excel, OOo, Gnumeric, KSpread, etc., do?

Even if you don't like _automatic_ conversion of string to number, I think we all agree that there MUST be a function that does it... and that's VALUE.  But I don't think we can leave such an important issue unstated.

--- David A. Wheeler