Re: Why emacs have not native language menu

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Hadron <hadronquark@googlemail.com>
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:10:41 +0200
> 
> > Nowadays, with the Internet and the worldwide job market, it's just
> > impossible to translate a programming language.  And this is what
> > emacs is.
> 
> No. That is NOT what emacs is. eLisp is the programming language. Emacs
> is an infrastructure which supports multiple applications programmed in
> elisp. They can be localised.

Don't forget that Lisp is a language without fundamental distinction
between program code and data.  In Lisp, I can construct a string in
memory, and then execute it as a function.

This happens a lot on the Lisp level, but spills into the low-level C
code as well.  Consider the following C snippet, for example:

      call1 (intern ("ask-user-about-supersession-threat"), fn);

Without knowing quite a few bits about Emacs internals, one cannot
decide whether the string here needs or needs not be translated.

So a clean separation between translatable strings and untranslatable
code symbols is much harder than in C or Pascal, for example.