Reverends monks, I humbly ask for your wisdom to elighten me.....
I found this weird behavior of a C program embedding perl. If you compile the enclosed program by

cc -o test test.c -Wall `perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ccopts -e ldopts`
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and then execute the resulting executable, then:

• If LANG isn't set, or it's set to a language using '.' as decimal point, then everithing goes well. Same thing if I force LC_NUMERIC to be C.
• On the other side, if LANG is something like it_IT.ISO-8859-1, whic claimes for a comma, I get the following error:

  Argument "5,00503" isn't numeric in require at /usr/lib/perl5/5.005/i3
  +86-linux/Config.pm line 7.
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  It seems that $] has value 5,00503 instead of 5.00503...

This looks weird :( Should I fill a bug report, or simply I made a mess? :)))
humbly waiting for a reply :)

/*test.c*/

#include <EXTERN.h>               /* from the Perl distribution     */
#include <perl.h>                 /* from the Perl distribution     */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <locale.h>

static PerlInterpreter *my_perl;  /***    The Perl interpreter    ***/

static char *perl_args[] = { "", "-e", "0", "-w" };
static char perl_script[] = {
  "use IO::Socket;\n" 
  "my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET or die qq/Can't create socket!/;\n"
  "print qq/Done\n/;"
};
 
extern void xs_init _((void));
extern void boot_DynaLoader _((CV * cv));
void
xs_init ()
{
    char *file = __FILE__;
    /* this allows using dynamicaly loaded modules... see
       perlembed manpage*/
    newXS ("DynaLoader::boot_DynaLoader", boot_DynaLoader, file);
}


int main(int argc, char **argv, char **env)
{

  setlocale (LC_ALL, "");
  fprintf(stderr,"Locale value for NUMERIC is %s\n",setlocale(LC_NUMER
+IC,NULL));  my_perl = perl_alloc();
  perl_construct(my_perl);
  perl_parse(my_perl, xs_init, 4, perl_args, (char **)NULL);
  perl_eval_pv(perl_script,(I32) NULL);
  perl_destruct(my_perl);
  perl_free(my_perl);
  exit(0);
}
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TheHobbit