Re: Strings again

On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 23:43:04 -0700, Roger Binns wrote:

> Mark Hahn wrote:
>> Thanks for the lengthy detailed reply.  Can you give me any pointers
>> to Python's implementation or support of locale?
> 
> The locale module is available on Windows and Linux and presumably
> Mac.  It deals with setting the process wide locale as well as
> several formatting functions.
> 
> There is also a gettext module for translations.  time.strftime
> can also do the right thing for the locale.
> 
> On the gui side I use wxWidgets.  It does have Unicode but that
> doesn't go too deep.  There is a wxLocale class that is the
> same thing as the Python locale module.  There is also some
> stuff to deal with font mapping.
> 
> Even just trying to display a unicode string is hard.  For
> example no font actually has all unicode characters.  They
> usually just have subsets.  Usually it isn't an issue if
> all the text comes from the same locale (eg all Greek or
> all Cyrillic), but if you try to display text with both
> you get boxes for which charcters the font doesn't have.
> Just getting a Unicode string to display right is hard code.
> See Raymond Chen's blog at
> http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07/16/185261.aspx
> 
> And from the comments you will see that it doesn't handle
> text that goes right to left or bidirectional text.
> 
> To get an idea of where you will have to end up, look at
> Java.  See the java.text package which does the locale
> and gettext style stuff:
> 
> http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/
> 
> See also this tutorial on internationalising/localising
> a Java program:
> 
> http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/intro/
> 
> Quite frankly most people look at that and decide that
> there is no way they will go to that much effort unless
> absolutely forced to.  I agree :-)  I also put the
> blame fairly and squarely on the language and libraries
> which make it tedious and verbose.
> 
> This is what you have to do to do a web app in J2EE
> (where each client could have a different locale
> than the server program).
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/59o55
> 
> And here is the main entry point for the i18n/l10n doc:
> 
> http://java.sun.com/j2se/corejava/intl/index.jsp
> 
> Current "state of the art" amongst all programming environments
> is that i18n/l10n programs have to manually call extra functions
> to setup locales, manually mark text that needs to be looked up
> in external catalogs (with a fair amount of setup to find them),
> manually make many extra calls if you want parameter positioning,
> locale correct number/date/currency/string formatting/sorting,
> and various bizarre platform specific APIs if you want to
> deal with things like bidirectional text display or unicode/locale
> interaction issues.  Oh, and they all do something like "internally
> all strings are stored as Unicode using X bits which should
> be enough for anyone".  (You picked 24 for X :-)
> 
> In addition to the tedious manual crap listed above, few environments
> have done anything about making I/O easier.  If you have never
> done Java programming before, try to write a program that opens a
> text file and prints the first line.  Experienced Java programmers
> usually have to lookup which three classes they need :-)
> 
> Why is it so hard to change how a program inputs and outputs
> stuff?  I remind you of the test I posted in an earlier message:
> 
>   Here is the true test.  Take a sample "Hello World" program
>   and also have it output todays date, and how many days of the
>   month have passed as a percentage.
> 
>   How much extra effort (just on the coding side) is it to also
>   output in German?  Japanese? Hebrew? Arabic?  HTML?  XML?
>   teletype?
> 
>   For the next generation of languages I believe the answer
>   is going to be "none".
> 
> Roger

OK then, what does Prothon have to do to be one of these "next generation
languages"?

You make it sound impossible, but you must believe it can be done if you
think a new generation is going to do it.  My experience says that this
kind of thing is accompished by breakthroughs in simple creative
approaches, not by some kind of brute force "program every possbility"
approach.  So what new breakthrough is going to make this happen?