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Re: Run-time internationalized messages


From: Hans Aberg
Subject: Re: Run-time internationalized messages
Date: Sun, 4 May 2003 18:39:29 +0200

At 17:33 +0200 2003/05/04, Tim Van Holder wrote:
>> I think that the approach in mind here was a static approach.
>> This should not even be very difficult to do, in view of
>> Bison's current M4 approach:
>> Simply replace all output strings that the parser uses with
>> macros, then merely supply a special string macro file. If
>> you then want to change the parser strings, merely change
>> that output.
>
>Hmm - that sounds like you decide the output language at bison
>time.  This does not seem a great idea.

As I also said, once one has put them in macros, you can do waht you want
with them: Write a dynamic output if you so like.

(Note the ambiguity: The "output language" could mean the computer
language, C/C++ etc, that Bison outputs. :-) )

>> Now you evidently want a dynamic approach. One approach might
>> be to put all the default strings in character arrays, which
>> easily can be changed at runtime, if the names of the strings
>> are known. If the strings are already in M4 macros, the only
>> thing that would be needed is a special M4 skeleton file.
>
>Why reinvent the wheel?  Many systems already have some form of
>gettext, which was made exactly for this purpose: translating
>messages.  All bison needs to to is wrap its translatable strings
>in some macro (be it the canonical '_', or some other one), and
>provide a default no-op version of that macro (much like most GNU
>apps do now).
>Perhaps the message strings could be named variables to make a
>custom translation routine easier.  This would require another
>macro to mark these strings as translatable but not translate them
>yet.

Good. If that already exist, just flip it in. (I should perhaps not have
commented -- I do not know that stuff. :-) )

>> As for the question of making the thing platform independent,
>> there is no such a thing with respect to output languages like C/C++.
>> So there you are left out in the cold. When I discussed it in a C++
>> newsgroup, the best thing that people really needing this feature
>> (as those writing WWW browsers/servers and such) currently could find
>> was to give names to each character according to some encoding, and
>> then use that. For example, using
>> Unicode:
>>    unsigned LATIN_CAPITAL_LETTER_A = 0x0041;
>>    ...
>> or
>>    #define LATIN_CAPITAL_LETTER_A 0x0041
>>    ...
>> Then use LATIN_CAPITAL_LETTER_A instead of "A". One can
>> probably easily
>> produce such list of characters by taking down the Unicode
>> Namelist and
>> convert to C format via a suitable small program.
>>
>> All remains is finding someone willing to do the job. :-)
>
>I don't see how that helps much - except with character sets, but
>handling character sets would be an issue for the person writing the
>translation function (gettext already handles this through iconv),
>not for bison (I consider outputting UTF-8 english strings translation
>as well (from en.ISO-8859-1 to en.UTF-8)).

One does that stuff in order not having to write a new function for each
compiler. Even different compilers on the same platform may behave
differently. Especially in a distributed Internet setting, one will refer
to specific encodings, and that is not accessible via C/C++ string
constructs "...".

>For C++ the main problem is that the
>  stream << "text" << number << "more text" << endl;
>lends itself very very badly to i18n (because you are stuck with the
>word order, have to translate fragments instead of sentences, and have
>no way to deal with plural forms).  Which results in having to use a
>printf-like function in C++, which isn't natural, but the only way to
>have sane i18n.  C++ really needs a good text formatting system that
>does
>not lose coherence as the current system does - but for that it would
>probably have to go fully OO with a to_string() primitive for all
>objects.
>
>For non-C/C++ languages (Java, C#, etc) other problems arise (no macros,
>for one).  In some cases there is built-in i18n support (e.g. Java, C#),
>but it will definitely not be the same across languages.

If the strings that the parser uses are put into M4 macros, one can write
special output functions for each language. It will not make any difference
what one does in C.

One will still need somebody doing the job. :-)

  Hans Aberg






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