Re: Internationalize Emacs's messages (swahili)

[Richard Stallman]

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  > > Is it feasible to write a small Fluent interpreter in C for this
  > > purpose?

  > Absolutely, but my personal preference is to write it in Elisp.

An implementation in Elisp could be ok for Emacs, but Emacs is just
one of hundreds of GNU packages, and one of thousands of packages in
the GNU system.

To fully adopt Fluent along with gettext as the GNU method of handling
this, we need to make it work in C programs.  The only simple, clean
and general way is to implement it in C.

Maintainers will never adopt this if their programs need to link
with Emacs or with Rust.

  > The message catalog files (MO files) just have flat strings with no
  > notion of substitutions or function calls. This is why my first
  > inclination was to generate elisp code from a Fluent file.

I don't follow how the beginning leads to the conclusion.

  > The easiest way to mush gettext and fluent together is to put some
  > syntax into the messages that is post-processed before being returned to
  > the caller, turning it into an interpreter.

That is too terse for me -- I am totally list.

                                                Something like this in a PO
  > file:

  > msgid "-sync-brand-name"
  > msgstr "Firefox Account"

  > msgid "sync-signedout-title"
  > msgstr "Connect with your {-sync-brand-name}"

I see what it says, but can you explain how that relates to "syntax
that is post-processed before being returned to the caller"?  Terse
references such as "the caller" leave me lost because I can't tell
what they refer to.  The leap is too long for me to follow.

  > Also, note that the original language wants to have the same
  > substitution capabilities as the translations.

What does "the original language" mean here?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)