Re: Internationalize Emacs's messages (swahili)

[Daniel Brooks]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> My personal opinion is that gettext is too limited. It works for simple
>> things, but provides no help at all for complex things.
>
> My feeling is that Emacs is so far from those problems that considering
> such issues will do little more than delay any actual progress.

Possibly, but I'm not so sure. Just looking at the message function for
a moment (because it's easy to grep for), there are a nonzero number
that do numeric substitions. Here are a few selected examples:

    ./lisp/sort.el:638:      (message "Deleted %d %sduplicate line%s%s"
    ./lisp/calendar/cal-hebrew.el:188:  (message "Hebrew date (until sunset): 
%s"
    ./lisp/ido.el:1670:    (message "Ido mode %s" (if ido-mode "enabled" 
"disabled"))))
    ./lisp/calendar/appt.el:716:          (message "Appointment reminders 
enabled%s"
    ./lisp/calendar/icalendar.el:2287:                 (message "Cannot handle 
COUNT attribute for `%s' events."
    ./lisp/calendar/calendar.el:2040:    (message "Region has %d day%s 
(inclusive)"
    ./lisp/calendar/todo-mode.el:725:                  (message "There is no %s 
file for %s"
    ./lisp/calendar/todo-mode.el:5672:    (when prompt (message "Press a key 
(so far `%s'): %s" keys-so-far prompt))
    ./lisp/calendar/todo-mode.el:5772:  (message (concat "File" (if pl "s" "") 
" %s ha" (if pl "ve" "s")
    ./lisp/registry.el:317:          (message "reindexing: %d of %d (%.2f%%)"

The one from todo-mode.el:5772 is quite interesting; you can see that
it's complex because it's handling English plurals. That complexity
would be moved into the English translation and out of todo-mode.el
entirely. The ones with colons are a way to make the substitution more
generic across languages by making plurals less necessary at the cost of
being more stilted.

db48x