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: 103376,699cc914522aa7c4 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Wasteful internationalization References: <_wrvh.30646$E02.12547@newsb.telia.net> From: Markus E Leypold Organization: N/A Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 02:54:53 +0100 Message-ID: User-Agent: Some cool user agent (SCUG) Cancel-Lock: sha1:+wKNsogvoHbUr66rG6nuXGTomOE= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii NNTP-Posting-Host: 88.74.38.71 X-Trace: news.arcor-ip.de 1170726589 88.74.38.71 (6 Feb 2007 02:49:49 +0200) X-Complaints-To: abuse@arcor-ip.de Path: g2news2.google.com!news1.google.com!news3.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!newsfeed01.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!newsfeed.arcor-ip.de!news.arcor-ip.de!not-for-mail Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:9005 Date: 2007-02-06T02:54:53+01:00 List-Id: "Randy Brukardt" writes: > Anyway, the discussion point was the readability and portability of Ada > sources. You can probably get by ignoring the exact content of strings, but > that's impossible with identifiers. So a program with Chinese identifiers is > going to be unreadable to someone outside of China. Now, how am I going to > do technical support for those programs? Or use open source programs written > that way? Ugh!! > > Randy. Some 10 years ago one could buy a russian DOS clone (PTS Dos) with full sources. That was funny too: The comment where mostly in russian (cyrillic) and one couldn't read them on a DOS machine. A small number of comments were in english which became more understandable after translating it into german word for word (i.e. w/o looking at the possible meaning, just use "Speicher-Loch" for " memory hole" (which should have been "memory leak") etc. The identifiers were just nonsense or bad english too. Such a program is absolutely unmaintainable (outside of russia, that is, in this case). Regards -- Markus