Re: Ada and Internationalization

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
news:1b6kk4c3suwjg.84fral2281gm$.dlg@40tude.net...
...
> In a recent project I had a similar problem. In place of localization
there
> were different rendering devices: Text, HTML, GTK etc. It ended up with a
> primitive operation defined on objects, that had a class-wide argument
> controlling the output parameters. Needless to say, that I am not
satisfied
> with this design.

I had a similar problem with the formatting tool that produces the Ada
Reference Manual and other good stuff. (In fact, it is essentially the same
problem.) I ended up defining an "output object" abstract type, with
instances of the type for text, HTML, and RTF. The needed operations for
formatting and the like are defined for the abstract type. The formatting
engine takes an output object and writes to it as needed.

The design was fairly successful; Stephen Leake created a new type and
object to support TextInfo output. He was able to do that fairly
successfully with the interface already provided.

                         Randy Brukardt