For purpose of localisation with gettext, we need a way
to mark strings that may be replaceable.
The C convention is:
_("morning")
The xgettext program can be used to create a catalogue of
such strings, which can then be copied and customised for
a particular language.
There are two way to use the message cattledogs:
(a) translate at run time
(b) translate at compile time
Ok, now the C convention isn't suited to Felix:
print "Hello"; endl; // original
print _("Hello"); endl; // type error!
I'm thinking of this:
print __"Hello"; endl;
or perhaps:
print _i18n"Hello"; endl;
or something similar. To make this work I had to use
xgettext --language=Perl --keyword=__ filename
So it will NOT work for triple quoted strings.
The Perl hackery in xgettext may defeat some cases.
There's also a problem with format codes, as I understand it
in C you can do:
printf(_("%s likes %s"),subject, object);
and xgettext will ACTUALLY catalog
"%1$s likes %2$s"
so that a translation is order independent, eg you could use
"%2$s is liked by %1$s"
as a translation, and GNU libc printf will respect this.
Felix uses vsnprintf to handle C format codes -- however
it also statically type checks the arguments and requires
a literal format string:
print$ f"%d likes %d"$ 1,2;
so any replacement would be compile time only.
The idea at the moment is that if you have xgettext installed,
then 'flx' will produce a filename.pot file automatically.
Similarly at run time, message catalog will be looked up
automatically, in a manner similar to C .. and in fact by
literally generated gettext compliant C++.
However an option would be to localise at compile time.
An alternative to using xgettext would be to generate the *.pot
file inside the flxg compiler .. or even use a completely
different system.
Any comments appreciated. Hopefully RF can test this when it
works by making some Italian versions of some programs :)
Localising the compiler itself is another issue
(I shudder to think how we'd cope with the rate of
change of diagnostic messages).
--
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net
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