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,FREEMAIL_FROM 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: 2004-04-17 21:10:03 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!news.glorb.com!border1.nntp.ash.giganews.com!border2.nntp.ash.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!wn13feed!worldnet.att.net!bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net.POSTED!not-for-mail From: David Starner Subject: Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping User-Agent: Pan/0.14.2.91 (As She Crawled Across the Table (Debian GNU/Linux)) Message-Id: Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <20040206174017.7E84F4C4114@lovelace.ada-france.org> <874qs0zvy1.fsf@insalien.org> <40714C98.90601@noplace.com> <1073gv22t969q5a@corp.supernews.com> <40729B9D.30906@noplace.com> <1076000ef5oj06f@corp.supernews.com> <87d666wjq3.fsf@insalien.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 04:10:03 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.72.68.158 X-Complaints-To: abuse@worldnet.att.net X-Trace: bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net 1082261403 12.72.68.158 (Sun, 18 Apr 2004 04:10:03 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 04:10:03 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:7297 Date: 2004-04-18T04:10:03+00:00 List-Id: On Sat, 17 Apr 2004 22:38:43 +0000, Georg Bauhaus wrote: > Ludovic Brenta wrote: > > > : If you have strings > : meant for display to the end user, you should place them in a separate > : file and use gettext. > > Ada is enough here I think, and has the advantage that you can > have an Ada compiler check the completeness of messages. Problem #1: Translators don't necessarily know programming, and hence may mangle the code. Problem #2: Instead of 2 message, 2 language table, imagine a 500 message, 50 language table, which is being done in Gnome and KDE. Problem #3: There's dozens of tools out there that handle gettext (.po) files, include translation memories and other useful things. Problem #4: Even in theory, it would be much harder to write a tool to extract messages from a table embedded in source code and process them than it would be to process them from a format designed for translation. Problem #5: Your format doesn't handle real-life issues where an error message is added late, and is only translated into Japanese, so you don't have complete translations, but they're far better than dropping back to English completely. (Any solution to this is going to exasperate #1 and #4 and probably #2 as well.) Would you write your build-system in Ada instead of Make? Use the right tool for the job.