[plt-dev] Re: localization

On Apr 22, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> Having said that, I am wondering how Java apps are localized. Anyone
> know?

IIUC, it's very similar to the string-constants library, with one big
difference, which is (IMO) a design problem with string-constants...
The difference is that each application has its own set of strings,
instead of a single repository.  The problem is that the current
collection of strings is "mostly drscheme", with some tools that are
part of its gui -- and this creates a dependency bottleneck.  Ignoring
the issue of whether it's good or not to localize error messages
without localizing the languae's identifiers, a more obvious way to
see the problem is if someone wants to write a DrScheme extension and
make it use different strings -- with the current design, the only way
to get that is to add the new strings to the central pool, which
doesn't make much sense.

"Fixing" the current string-constants should probably be done roughly
as a generalization of the core language selection mechanism and macro
into a new library, then make the current string-constant library use
that.  If/when that's done, it will be possible to split the constants
into the different applications.

There is a problem with that though -- translation work becomes more
difficult to do, since there are more than one file to track down.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
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