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From: Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Text_IO, was: Re: Something I don't understand
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2014 12:53:58 +0000 (UTC)
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Date: 2014-02-20T12:53:58+00:00
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On 2014-02-20, G.B. <rm-dash-bau-haus@dash.futureapps.de> wrote:
> On 20.02.14 02:09, Simon Clubley wrote:
>
>> Are you familiar with the VMS $FAO directive (which is the way VMS does
>> template formatting) ?
>>
>> Background material on $FAO is at:
>>
>> 	http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/82final/4527/4527pro_047.html
>> [... !%S]
>> Something like that would handle this problem rather cleanly.
>
> Would this address the needs of international language processing?
> Even English has plural words without 's'; other grammars might
> need different ways of representing plurals altogether; I understand
> that doubling a word or syllable or symbol is a scheme for expressing
> plurals in East Asia, for example.
>

That's why VMS Engineering added the option to $FAO which allows a
application specified word to be inserted based on the value of the
previous number.

I'm not saying we should duplicate this exactly. I just mentioned it as
a real world example of a template formatting system which has conditional
formatting built into it.

> Handling natural language issues is a bit too tricky
> to be part of a regular programming formalism, I think.
>

It's certainly not easy. I wonder how something like gettext would
handle this problem ? (I've never had to support foreign languages
in my code so I don't know the answer to that question.)

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world