Re: Emacs i18n

[Richard Stallman]

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  > You mean, the function, such as 'message', that receives the string
  > will translate it?  As opposed to the alternative of translating the
  > string _before_ it gets passed to the function?

Yes, of course.

  > If we do that, how do we deal with strings that are computed by
  > concatenation or formatting?

Feed them in through %s or something like that.

I'm proposing the convention that the first argument to 'message' gets
by default translated, and other arguments don't.  With this
convention, whichever result you want, it is clear how to get it.

We already do things basically this way, because if you want to
compute a string to be the message, you don't want % to be treated
specially in it.  So you use "%s" as the first argument and pas that
string as the second.

So I think this will require only occasional changes
and they won't be urgent.

  >   They get in one piece to functions like
  > 'message', but the catalog will not hold that concatenated string, it
  > will have the parts separately.

That would happen if the catalog is made ONLY by scanning the source.
That's why I suggested a feature to record whatever nontrivial format
strings are passed to 'message' and are not in the catalog.

Then you can add them to the catalog, or fix things some other way.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)