Re: Ada and Internationalization

[James Dennett <jdennett@cox.net>]

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Wed, 31 May 2006 07:53:36 -0700, James Dennett wrote:
> 
>> Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> 
>>> I don't see how this is related to internationalization. It looks like 
>>> stream communication (see S"Output attribute) or string formatting. In 
>>> either case you convert data to/from stream/string.
>> Formatting of strings for human readers needs to produce
>> output that is correctly localized, hence is always an
>> issue in an internationalized program, non?
> 
> I am not sure. It looks like a question of content. Formatting is a quite
> low level thing. Mixing content and formatting can turn very surprising.
> There are right-to-left and top-down languages, word ordering might change,
> their number as well, numerals, ordinals, articles, inflexions etc.

And these are included in my notion of internationalized
formatting, though for a wide range of languages we can
get away with supporting left-to-right, and just dealing
with issues of phrase lookup, word ordering and cardinality.

> [ Both as a customer and vendor I always try to avoid internationalized
> programs. (:-)) ]

That is increasingly difficult in many domains, though it's
certainly true that programming is somewhat simpler when
I18N is not a factor.

-- James