std.locale

[Leandro Lucarella]

Michel Fortin, el  2 de marzo a las 07:30 me escribiste:
> On 2009-03-02 01:04:47 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:
> 
> >Good idea. But before we do so, I was hoping I'd pick the brains of people who have used locales in other languages and understand the burning points. Somehow, 
> >however, I'm doing a lousy job at eliciting contributions from people on this newsgroup (guess I'd be a lousy salesman). I tried a couple of times and all I got 
> >was a few new keyword proposals and a few new syntax proposals :o). What am I doing wrong?
> 
> I think there are three aspects to localization. One is date and number
> formating. Another is offering a facility for translating all the
> messages an application can give. And the last one is the configuration
> part, where you know which format to use.

I think you are confusing localization (l10n) with internationalization
(i18n)[1]. Locales is about l10n, it's numbers and date formats, time zones,
etc. i18n is about translations.

I've used the standard C API for localization and I found it quite simple
and good. What's wrong with it?

I've used gettext[1] too (which is almost a de-facto standard in unix),
and even when it could be improved I think it does a pretty good job, and
it has a lot of very subtle problems solved.

I think l10n and i18n should be taken with a lot of care, because it's
very hard to get it right (like concurrency ;). There are a lot of rough
edges and exceptions to thing that at first sight looks so universal that
makes very easy to make a bad desing (like plural forms[3]). The gettext
manual[4] is a great source to see how big this is. Gettext is supported
in most major programming languages, so I think D could greatly benefit
from using it
too.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/
[3] http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Plural-forms
[4] http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (luca) | Blog colectivo: http://www.mazziblog.com.ar/blog/
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