Re: Programming for the World in Ada95

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@quadruscorp.com>]

Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
> declare all your messages as constants in packages, one package per
> language, i.e.
<snip>

While this will work, it does happen at compile time. A better method
would be to do it at run time so that an "International" software
product would differ only by a simple text file.

Short of an OS specific solution, I'd build an error message package
that loaded the text at startup from a language specific file and then
index all the error messages by an enumerated type. Something like:

package Error_Messages is

    type Error_Type is (
        Some_Error,
        Another_Error,
        Etc_Errors) ;

    procedure Display_Message (
        Err    : in     Error_Type) ;

    -- The rest is an exercise for the student.

end Error_Messages ;

Clearly, the source code will be language specific, but whatever text
you want to associate with "Some_Error" or "Another_Error" could be very
dynamic. How elaborate you want to get with selecting the specific error
message file would depend on your tastes and how much work you want to
do.

Of course, this is an overall strategy which is not really Ada specific.
A good software design for doing this would be an advantage to any
application in any language.

MDC
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