Re: Word order in Guix l10n

[Miguel Ángel Arruga Vivas]

Hi Ludo,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> With (ice-9 format), as has been suggested before, we should be able to
> do away with the “argument jumping” syntax (info "(guile) Formatted
> Output"):
>
>   (format #f "~1@*~d Zeichen lang ist die Zeichenkette `~0@*~a'" "ab" 2)
>
> It’s a bit awkward though, in particular because we have to jump to the
> previous argument (0 and 1 here instead of 1 and 2).

I wouldn't think of absolute goto directive jumping to the previous
argument, it's just another chapter of the eternal debate regarding the
first ordinal: Common Lisp/SLIB/ice-9 use the '0' convention for the
'first' position---the smallest element from the set of natural
numbers---, instead of '1'.  C-style arrays can be interpreted like this
too.

> Does xgettext support that syntax?  We’ve had troubles before with ~*.

These troubles are related to plural forms[1].  Singular forms don't
have any issue because the type and number of format specifiers must
match always.

> If it does, where should we use this syntax in lieu of the simpler
> forms?  Everywhere?

Yup, for singular forms (non-ngettext) it can be used everywhere right
now.  The translation of plural forms could, at most, omit one numeric
directive (the one used for the ngettext call) to allow a more natural
way of expressing implicitly the numeral, but this will need to wait for
the next release of GNU gettext---the patch is almost there[2].
Nonetheless, the current version of msgfmt works correctly when no
format directive is omitted.

Happy hacking!
Miguel

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gettext/2020-11/msg00027.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gettext/2020-12/msg00041.html