Re: [boost] [locale] Formal review of Boost.Locale library EXTENDED

Subject: Re: [boost] [locale] Formal review of Boost.Locale library EXTENDED
From: Ryou Ezoe (boostcpp_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-04-19 03:41:55

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 4:17 PM, Matus Chochlik <chochlik_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 2:10 AM, Edward Diener <eldiener_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> On 4/18/2011 9:53 AM, Paul A. Bristow wrote:
>>
>>> PS Without wishing to sound too British - "If the natives don't
>>> understand,
>>> just shout louder.",
>>
>> Now I know why Gandhi fought so hard for an independent country. Yes, I
>> understand, then above is British humour.
>
> +1
> Funny but a little arrogant.
>
>>
>>> I have little sympathy with the view expressed that no knowledge of
>>> English
>>> should be required.
>>> (Is this the cost of Japanese failure in the 80's to succeed in their
>>> ambition to dominate hardware and software with a world-beating language
>>> in
>>> Japanese?)
>>
>> What language was that ?
>>
>>>
>>> C++ just is a language in English, so you must surely expect to have some
>>> rudimentary knowledge of this useful language.
>>
>> The amount of rudimentary knowledge of English necessay to use C++ keywords
>> and C++ standard library classes is so incredibly little compared to an
>> actual knowledge of English grammar, that I doubt whether a knowledge of
>> English is really necessary in any way in order to program in C++.
>
> I'm not a native English speaker and it took me nearly a decade
> to learn English in such a way that I was able to communicate
> more elaborate "thoughts" than "Hello", "My name is X Y", I'm N year old" :)
> and it still could be much better.
>
> But, I accept English as the necessary and very useful tool for my work
> in IT/CS. (just as most medical doctors accept the use of Latin, I guess)
> Most of the documentation and basically every mainstream programming
> language uses English so knowing the language at least at some level
> is a "must" here.
>
>>
>> My personal objection to Gnu gettext and its English bias has nothing to do
>> with any desire myself to use a language other than English in order to
>> communicate, since English ( or perhaps Americanese ) is the language of the
>> country in which I was born, but nearly everything to do with my sense of
>> the problems of translating even computer program phraseology from one
>> language to another without complicating things by having to put some other
>> language, even a very popular one, in the middle.
>>
>> Was that a single sentence ? I wonder if it can be translated to Japanese ?
>
> These are all valid points Speaking in a particular language means
> to be thinking in a certain way and many things can be lost in the translation.
> But I don't see above any solutions to the actual problem.
>
> >From how I see it there are several ways to handle this:
>
> 1) Stick to English phrases
> (-) Requires good knowledge of the English language
> (+) Easy to find someone to translate to language Y
> (+) Portable
> (+) Lots of mature l10n libraries work this way
> (+) Works (for English speakers) even if the translation fails
>
> 2) Use English identifier strings (as Peter Dimov suggested)
> (-) Still requires some English
> (-) Hard to keep unique in large applications
> (-) Doesn't look good if the translation fails for some reason
> (+) Requires "less" English
>
> 3) Use the u"" U"" literals
> (-) Current support by the compilers
> (-) Requires the u/U/... prefix
> (+) Will be portable in the future
> (+) Does not require English
>
> 4) Use wchar_t and the L"" prefix literals
> (-) Non-portable and platform dependent
> (-) Requires the L prefix
> (+) Works if you are limited to a single platform
> (+) Does not require English
>
> 5) use char with some GUID literals/hashes
> (-) Completely unusable if the translation fails
> (-) Takes a lot of using to (easier for GIT users :))
> (-) Requires a GUID/hash generator
> (+) Portable
> (+) Does not require English
>
> 6) keep in original language but transliterate to Latin characters [a-z0-9]
> (-) Requires picking a good transliteration scheme
> (-) Hard to read in the code
> (-) Pretty unusable if the translation fails
> (+) Does not require the use of English
> (+) Portable
>
>
> Take your pick :-)
>
> Matus
> _______________________________________________
> Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
>

char is not portable too.
It can be any encodings.

-- 
Ryou Ezoe