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Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:28:35 +0200
From: Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>
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Date: 2012-08-01T12:28:34+02:00
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On 01.08.12 10:09, Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:

> My question was related to _translatable_ user visible strings.  If I
> just want to make an all-American program, your proposed solution is
> fine, but when I want to make it easy to translate the user visible
> strings in an application you proposed solution is unacceptable.

I have once tried to do this using Ada. The solution was, roughly, to
enumerate messages, and also enumerate (grammatical) parts of a message.
So, there were enum types, and this had some desirable consequences:

(a) I know each of the program's messages. It has a name (and/or number).
(b) There is some flexibility in placing parts of sentences,
    which differ per natural language.
(c) The messages can be transformed from Ada to XML and back,
    so that external, XML based translation tools would assist.
(d) No message can ever be missing.
(e) No external "message extraction tool" is needed.

The mechanism is a bit much for ad-hoc debugging text, I think,
but then debugging messages are not meant for users, and may
not need to be translated.

Don't know if SQL standard error numbers work the same way.