Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:30934 sci.astro:4365
Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!ukecc!agollum
From: agollum@engr.uky.edu (Kenneth Herron)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,sci.astro
Subject: Re: Internationalization of Software?
Message-ID: <2933@ukecc.engr.uky.edu>
Date: 2 Jul 89 14:08:46 GMT
References: <4380@druhi.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: agollum@engr.uky.edu (Kenneth Herron)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Way down south in the land of Basketball
Lines: 27

RBase (a database program for PC's) allows you to specify the currency
symbol used for currency values, as well as where it goes (before/after
the digits), and how many digits go to the right of the decimal (ie, two
for US dollars).  It also lets you customize the date and time formats to
your heart's content (You want AD and BC in your dates?  You got it!).

Most european users will be using ascii characters from the set above
127.  Don't use the high bit of char values for anything, and don't strip
it.  MS-DOS allows any character from the upper half of the character
set to be used in file names (In testing this statement, I just tried
to create a file called <alt-2-0-0>.txt (#200 is a graphics character).
The name was saved properly on my local floppy, but converted to H.TXT
on my novell netware directory).  Your hypothetical foreign user may
be using a keyboard driver to map the keyboard to his character set (and
even US users have the Dvorak set at their disposal) so don't do funny
things with the keyboard interrupt.

I believe characters #174 and #175 are quote characters in some languages.
Some of the high-bit letters are upper-case and some lower-case.  Some
have both cases represented, some do not.  ASCII order and alphabetical
order are not the same when considering these foreign characters.

One simple change is to let program messages and help text be read from
a file instead of being hard-coded into the program.  This lets your
foreign user translate messages himself.

Kenneth Herron