[Fwd: Re: ICU ResourceBundles for ext/unicode]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: ICU ResourceBundles for ext/unicode
Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2006 13:11:26 +0100
From: Michael Wallner <[email protected]>
To: Norbert Lindenberg <[email protected]>
CC: Andrei Zmievski <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: php.i18n
References: <[email protected]>

Norbert Lindenberg wrote:
> Hi all,

Hi Norbert!

> The ICU style of resource bundles is Unicode based, but also seems more
> complicated than desirable for PHP. It's designed for a statically typed
> environment and requires compilation, neither of which fit in well with
> PHP.

That's probably true.  But the same applies to the past and gettext.

> 
> I'd rather start with Java properties files, the simplest and most
> widely used form of Java resource files. I'd adapt them to PHP 6 by
> switching their encoding to UTF-8, adopting heredocs, and simplifying
> their syntax. I'd drop the secondary fallback mechanism, in which
> resource bundles can inherit individual resources from other bundles.
> This is an optimization to reduce the size of bundles at the expense of
> runtime overhead and additional work in creating the bundles. The
> additional step of finding common resources and moving them to shared
> bundles is rarely made in normal localization processes, and the space
> savings don't matter much for PHP, where bundles remain on the server.
> Dropping the secondary fallback also means that we can simplify the
> resource bundle to just an array.
> [...]
> What do you think?

The idea is quite confusing to me...

I don't see any compelling reasons to create a new file format and write
a parser for it from scratch.  I could understand if you suggested to implement
a parser for plaintext ICU resourcebundle templates, which would extinct the
compilation process and wouldn't benefit from the fallback mechanism.  I guess
we could even exploit icu/source/tools/genrb/parse.c for that matter.

Regards,
-- 
Michael


-- 
Michael