std.locale

[Yigal Chripun]

Sergey Gromov wrote:
> Mon, 02 Mar 2009 09:34:32 +0200, Georg Wrede wrote:
>
>>>> Of course, eventually we will want to "do something" about this. But
>>>> that should be left to the day when real issues are all sorted out in
>>>> D. This is a non-urgent, low-priority thing.
>> Had there been any need for locales, believe me, the "foreigners" in
>> this NG would have asked for it.
>
> I'm Russian.  For me, encoding problems are a PITA of such epic
> proportions that little format inconsistencies simply fade away.  Yes
> it's sometimes hard to decipher what 02/03/08 means since our custom is
> to put day first and separate with dots.  But compare this to Adobe Flex
> SDK which prints half compiler error messages in Russian (thank you
> Adobe!) using system default code page, 1251, while default /console/
> code page is actually so-called IBM 866.  Whenever I use MXML compiler
> from console I get rubbish for error messages.  And there is no way to
> disable translation--I've found none.  Phobos is no better.  Any
> exception resulting from an invalid OS call dumps UTF-8 garbage instead
> of an error message.  std.file.read("non-existent") for instance.
>
> I think games are not an issue.  I've worked for a company producing
> cell phone games for a long time.  I've localized my game for Chinese
> market, too.  The thing is, game interfaces are always custom, always
> ad-hoc.  They *never* work in untested locales.  Well, with some
> experience you can make them work most of the time in languages you are
> familiar with, from localization perspective.  Anyway, all you need to
> know is an ID of a supported locale so that you can replace text and
> locale-specific images accordingly.  Then you have correctors and native
> testing to make sure the localization works.

encoding isn't that hard compared to other issues.
for instance, have you ever tried to make a website go both ways?