> I'm not really arguing for or against this, but since when did speaking > english become a corollary of being intelligent? And even if we accept > the rather ridiculous hypotheis that all php developers can comprehend > english, what if they don't want to, or are more confident using their > native tongue in day-to-day work? Why deny that to them on prinicple? >
Well, speaking english as a corollary for intelligence, perhaps not, education most likely. I've spoken to very few PhDs abroad that don't speak english, I've spoken to quite a few Supermarket checkout people that don't speak english. But that's another discussion. :-) > Plenty of products support multi-lingual errors in the way John > describes. In fact there's an argument that constant-based error codes > are even easier to describe than verobose english descriptions, as they > leave no room for ambiguity due to re-phrasing. > They also make it incredibly unintuitive :) There needs to be a medium between maintainability and sanity. Understanding basic english can be a requirement. If they really have problems, they can read the docs which explain the errors to users who don't speak english... The question is - what language does this different? Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, C++, C all have english only error messages. Anyhow, until someone comes up with a viable implementation, the thought of whether this belongs in the language is pretty much right. :) -Sterling -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php