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.