Re: No call for Ada (was Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping

[David Starner <dvdeug@email.ro>]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2004 18:49:01 +0000, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> David Starner <dvdeug@email.ro> wrote:
> :
> : Problem #1: Translators don't necessarily know programming, and hence may
> : mangle the code.
> 
> This looks like a problem with .po files as well as with Ada files.
> One cannot automatically assume the existence of tools for one
> or the other.

Actually, I can assume the existence of tools for .po files. And if
the Turkish translator makes a bad change in the po file, it screws
up the Turkish translation. If the Turkish translator makes a bad change
to the source code, it could open a security hole; much more likely, it
"just" stops everyone from doing anything with the program until the bad
changes have been fixed.
 
> 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 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.
 
> : Problem #2: Instead of 2 message, 2 language table, imagine a 500
> : message, 50 language table, which is being done in Gnome and KDE.
> 
> So what? Serious software development can't treat messages to computer
> users like something that can be done just half way.
> 
> 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.

> : 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.)
> 
> Why, with the above, and with the language/ID indexing of Message,
> should I be dropping back to English *completely*?

You gave me a table that gives a compile time failure if you're missing a
message. 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. (If you just
put in the English message, then you can't tell the difference between
messages that are correctly translated the same as English, like city
names often are.)

> : Would you write your build-system in Ada instead of Make? Use the
> : right tool for the job.
> 
> Right, and don't create an unnecessary job in the first place! (BTW, I
> don't see what make has got to do with this?)

Make is a specialized language to handle a job you could do in Ada, just
like .po files are a specialized language to handle a job you could do in
Ada.

Have you ever translated a foreign program before? How about distributed a
program that had third-party translators who weren't programmers?