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-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,5cb36983754f64da X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2004-04-20 09:07:18 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!eusc.inter.net!cs.tu-berlin.de!uni-duisburg.de!not-for-mail From: Georg Bauhaus Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 16:07:17 +0000 (UTC) Organization: GMUGHDU Message-ID: References: <20040206174017.7E84F4C4114@lovelace.ada-france.org> <87d666wjq3.fsf@insalien.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de X-Trace: a1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de 1082477237 11210 134.91.1.34 (20 Apr 2004 16:07:17 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@news.uni-duisburg.de NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 16:07:17 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: tin/1.5.8-20010221 ("Blue Water") (UNIX) (HP-UX/B.11.00 (9000/800)) Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:7365 Date: 2004-04-20T16:07:17+00:00 List-Id: David Starner wrote: : On Sun, 18 Apr 2004 18:49:01 +0000, Georg Bauhaus wrote: : If the Turkish translator makes a bad change : to the source code, it could open a security hole; I don't suggest that any natural language translator ever touches the source code. :> Translation between the Ada table shown and .po files isn't difficult :> either. Only you don't need to scan the whole Ada program for text :> message candidates. Which in a sense is like I/O sprinkled all over the :> place. It smells like an aid for the lazy programmer who doesn't want to :> be drawn into the "modularisation of messages". : : But the program to do that translation hasn't been written. I showed you... :-) : I think that : making the programmer move every message to a huge table at the start of : the program just makes the program harder to read and understand. Not my experience. :> Or are you referring to the size of a complete table? : : Yes. That would be a huge chunk of code that would be hard to read and : edit. It is not meant to be edited by hand unless a new message is added to the default set of messages. And in that case, even if you stored _all_ of your 50 * 500 messages in the same unit, that it just 0.2% of an average PCs RAM. (Messages proper, taking GCC's da.po as an example showing an average message size of 44 characters.) Why hard to read (for the programmer, using Ada's enumerations and named notation)? : What happens if Turkish is missing "Your computer is a 286." : message and you can't fix that? There's no way to indicate that Turkish : hasn't translated this message yet, so fall back to English. What else can one possibly do? There have to be default messages. If I wan't a runtime indication of the translation status, I can add a Boolean to the message type. A dynamic message loading system seems like a good thing, but why not use the type system? : Have you ever translated a foreign program before? How about distributed a : program that had third-party translators who weren't programmers? Yes I have, and I had a passage on this in my post but dropped it. Example: The program's text resources are stored in a relational DB, in three different languages. Various technical schemes for the translation process had been proposed, including a web front end to the DB, and a solution built around validated XML using a customizable XML editor. None of them were chosen, instead we had to use spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel format, do CSV translation, and check for properly escaped characters. (It is not possible to connect Excel or OpenOffice and the database due to the setup.) However, the program and the messages can be changed independently, unless a message affects the meaning of the program. Georg