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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Re: Programming for the World in Ada95
Date: 2000/02/14
Message-ID: <2000Feb14.124131.1@eisner>#1/1
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References: <38A83838.44A43A7D@res.raytheon.com>
X-Trace: news.decus.org 950550095 2543 KILGALLEN [216.44.122.34]
Organization: LJK Software
Reply-To: Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 2000-02-14T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

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