Re: Emacs i18n

[Richard Stallman]

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  > we do something like this:

  >   (nmessage count
  >             "The highlighted item is not up to date."
  >             "The highlighted items are not up to date."
  >             timestamp)

It might be better to define a function like this

(defun numeric-select (count &rest messages)
  (or (nth count messages)
      (car (last messages))))

and then write

 (message (numeric-select count
               "The highlighted item is not up to date."
                "The highlighted items are not up to date."))

Translation infrastructure might be able to recognize this construct
and mark the two strings as translatable if they are constants.

Even better, translation could allow replacing that list of messages
with a different list of messages, perhaps longer.   That would
make possible perfect support for a language where you need a different
text for 2 and for numbers larger than 2.

We could decide that the first element is for COUNT = 0,
and if that element is a number instead of a string, it means
to use the element for that number.

  (message (numeric-select count
                 2
                 "The highlighted item is not up to date."
                 "The highlighted items are not up to date."))

This, together with the feature of translating the list
as a different list, could be totally general.


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