Command line arguments depend on locale

Apparently ping has now started interpreting its command line arguments depending on locale. I.e. ping -i 0.1 no longer works in locales where comma is the decimal separator. This makes it difficult to call system commands. The only workaround is to set LC_ALL to a known-good locale, but then your users get no benefit from the translations of error messages and so on. Is Linux really doomed to repeat the mistakes made by Visual Basic more than a decade ago? /Benny