Re: tlug: December I18N talk on-line

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric S Standlee <fwiw3980@example.com> writes:

    Eric> I wget'd your html file mentioned below and am attempting to
    Eric> read through it.  It is for me a very technical paper.  I do
    Eric> notice that while you encourage i18n in all programming, it
    Eric> seems that the difficulty of the task would discourage most.

I18N is substantially easier than programming X Windows or any of its
toolkits.  It's a matter of using I18N-aware functions rather than
ASCII-only functions; the POSIX standard mandates that these often
replace the ASCII-only functions in libc.  So there are only a few new
idioms to learn.  The remaining duty of the programmer is to make sure
the I18N features are initialized, by calling setlocale() early in the
program.

    Eric> Is there any hope that i18n will become easier than it
    Eric> appears in your paper, or am I misunderstanding you paper
    Eric> and it is already very easy?

Low level I18N is not going to become easy ever.  Natural language is
a bitch.

However, you can expect that scripting languages like Python and Perl
and GUI toolkits like Motif and GTK will do most of the work for you.

People whose programming activity mostly involves scripting and
prototyping in very high level languages are going to refuse to deal
with these issues, same as ever.  But we can expect that quality
development packages will do a fairly good job of providing basic
levels of implementation.  (Eg, database and spreadsheet type apps.)

People whose programming requires direct manipulation of text are
going to find it difficult for the foreseeable future.  (Eg, editors.)

People writing specs and documentation are probably going to have to
learn more about I18N than the programmers for most kinds of apps.

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