Sooner or later that will need to be defined. I know next to nothing
about locales. (I know I dislike the design C++ uses.)
I was thinking of a design along the following lines. There are RFCs
dedicated to locale nomenclature:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4646 for language names
http://www.unicode.org/cldr/ for various locale names
So we know the basic names we want to follow, which is one less burden.
Then what I want to do is to define a hierarchical string table that
fills the appropriate names.
This is in opposition to defining an actual class hierarchy that mimics
the localization table. I think a hierarchical string table is better
because it allows simple extensibility.
The type stored by each slot of a locale is:
Algebraic!(
int,
string,
Variant delegate(Variant),
This[string]);
meaning that a locale could store one of these types. (What else should
go in there?)
The access pattern goes like:
// Get the date display pattern
auto pat = myLocale.get("calendars", "calendar=default",
"dateFormats", "dateFormatLength=medium", "pattern");
This will return an Algebraic with a string in it. The string looks like
e.g. "yyyy-MM-dd".
The access is rather verbose because the corresponding locale names tree
is equally (actually more) verbose, see
http://unicode.org/Public/cldr/1.6.1/core.zip. But the flexibility and
the standards-compliance are there. We may add later some convenience
functions for frequently-used stuff such as dates, times, and numbers.
Extension is obvious:
myLocale.put("my-category", "my-slot", "whatever");
Getting later the stuff in "my-category", "my-slot" will return a string
Algebraic containing "whatever".
There will be a global reference to a Locale class, e.g. defaultLocale.
By default the reference will be null, implying the C locale should be
in effect. Applications can assign to it as they find fit, and also pass
around multiple locale variables.
So I wanted to gather some good ideas about locale design. Is a
string-and-Algebraic design good for all uses? What kind of locale
functionality does it not capture? I must have missed a ton of details,
so if you don't understand what I mean by the above, it must be me.
Andrei
