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From: erik@srava.sra.co.jp (Erik M. van der Poel)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Tools for manipulating message catalogs
Message-ID: <1132@sranha.sra.co.jp>
Date: 12 Apr 91 07:53:18 GMT
References: <1991Apr11.084924.1951@alphalpha.com>
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Organization: Software Research Associates, Inc., Japan
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Kee Hinckley writes:
> While you could argue that the code readability doesn't change,
> your mechanism makes it more likely that people will enter the wrong
> number in the code, and thus get the wrong error message.

Instead of treating the symptoms, we should try to cure the disease. 
Using numbers for the message ids was a bad idea in the first place. 
(Thank goodness XPG3 and AT&T's specs are not International
Standards.)

Wouldn't it be possible to create a reasonably efficient
implementation using hashing and caching with symbolic names instead
of numeric ids? Then we can add/delete/modify messages at will. We
should leave numbering and counting to the computer.
-
-- 
Erik M. van der Poel                                      erik@sra.co.jp
Software Research Associates, Inc., Tokyo, Japan     TEL +81-3-3234-2692