Re: Programming for the World in Ada95

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <38A83838.44A43A7D@res.raytheon.com>, John J Cupak Jr <John_J_Cupak@res.raytheon.com> writes:

> This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

Please don't send MIME to comp.lang.ada.

> Does anyone have any experiences, thoughts, or comments on how to write
> Ada 95 so that user messages, etc., are EASILY modified for different
> spoken/read languages, as noted in O'Donnel's excellent book,
> "Programming for the World"?

If you expect people to read that book before responding, you may have
a long wait.

> Is there an easy way to specify message strings at load time, or must
> this be done at compile time?

In general, standards for such things are controlled by the operating
system vendors.  Although you may have a recent book on the subject,
VMS has had a way of doing it since the beginning 22 years ago.
Macintosh from the beginning 16 years ago.  I know less about the
Microsoft way of doing it, or what version of Windows/DOS may have
introduced it.  In Unix, it tends to be tied into the notion of
"locale" in the C programming language.

If you want useful software, you will build it so the system manager
can configure the language settings in a fashion typical for the OS
in use.  That means you will not be able to avoid platform-specific
issues.

Larry Kilgallen