From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,79c108d8d805d021 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!peer01.cox.net!cox.net!p01!fed1read01.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: James Dennett User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 (Macintosh/20060308) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada and Internationalization References: <1149026932.554318.202570@i39g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <5zmch4oseolx.1ghtww9ope9bt$.dlg@40tude.net> In-Reply-To: <5zmch4oseolx.1ghtww9ope9bt$.dlg@40tude.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 08:27:38 -0700 NNTP-Posting-Host: 68.7.248.4 X-Complaints-To: abuse@cox.net X-Trace: fed1read01 1149089258 68.7.248.4 (Wed, 31 May 2006 11:27:38 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 11:27:38 EDT Organization: Cox Communications Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:4625 Date: 2006-05-31T08:27:38-07:00 List-Id: 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