+<h3><a name="locale">Why doesn't reading floating point numbers work when using wxWindows?</a></h3>
+
+If your program reads the floating point numbers in the format <tt>123.45</tt>
+from a file, it may suddently start returning just <tt>123</tt> instead of the
+correct value on some systems -- which is all the more mysterious as the same
+code in a standalone program works just fine.
+
+<p>
+The explanation is that GTK+ changes the current locale on program startup. If
+the decimal point character in the current locale is not the period (for
+example, it is comma in the French locale), all the standard C functions won't
+recognize the numbers such as above as floating point ones any more.
+
+<p>
+The solution is to either use your own function for reading the floating point
+numbers (probably the best one) or to call <tt>setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "C")</tt>
+before reading from file and restore the old locale back afterwards if needed.
+