Internationalization support and format strings

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 25/03/2025 11:39 AM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The GNU gettext package contains tools for internationalization, 
> enabling a programmer to make their package "speak" to the users in 
> their specific language.
> 
> GNU gettext so far supports a number of programming languages, see
> https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/List-of- 
> Programming-Languages.html
> 
> I thought it would be a good idea to make GNU gettext support also the D 
> programming language. This is a registered wish list item since 2017: 
> https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?51291 . On the D side, a rudimentary 
> interface to the gettext() function in the GNU C library exists as well: 
> https://code.dlang.org/packages/libintl
> 
> I am now trying to implement this support. I am already done with the 
> xgettext support (parsing D source code and extracting messages). But 
> from the programming language, this support also needs format strings 
> with positions (so that translators can reorder arguments in their 
> translations of format strings).
> 
> D has format strings in its standard library (phobos): https:// 
> dlang.org/library/std/format.html
> But this format string facility has 4 major bugs:

> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/issues/10699

Needs to be discussed.

Requires sentinel value, and right now its typed as a ubyte.

> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/issues/10711

I think its more that docs are wrong here, rather than implementation.

> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/issues/10712

I'm not sure about this one, it looks funky, but at least its easy 
enough to work around with.

I'll leave it to someone else.

> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/issues/10713

https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/10714