On 2013-01-15 17:00, H. S. Teoh wrote:
reading the format string alone says nothing about what meaning is
intended. What is found in a what? Also, it doesn't let you vary the
word order correctly. Nor does it let you perform inflection correctly.
For true ease of translation, you need:
1) Logical naming of format arguments, e.g.:
"%{filename} is found in %{dirname}"
I agree that named arguments are best -- then you don't require extra comments.
As for argument positioning, it already can be specified, for example "%1$s".
2) Some way to indicate the function of each word so that inflection can
be cone correctly, e.g.:
"%{filename.nominative} is found in %{dirname.locative}"
or something like that, in languages where words change form depending
on function. There will, of course, need to be requisite mechanisms for
interpreting these word function identifiers.
Filename and dirname don't look like good examples - they don't change.
Well, this is a problem much deeper than providing simple translation, so let's
drop this for now.
3) Some way to indicate multiplicity:
"1 file was found" vs. "2 files were found"
This is already taken care of in every gettext system I know.
The code would look something like this:
writefln(ngettext("%1$d file found in %2$s", "%1$d files found in %2$s", 2),
2, "folder X");
where ngettext takes 3 arguments: eng_singular, eng_plural, count.
