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From: erik@srava.sra.co.jp (Erik M. van der Poel)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Language dependent application defaults
Message-ID: <3893@srava.sra.co.jp>
Date: 16 Feb 90 11:24:46 GMT
References: <898@ztivax.UUCP> <9002151430.AA11687@expo.lcs.mit.edu>
Reply-To: erik@sra.co.jp (Erik M. van der Poel)
Organization: Software Research Associates, Inc., Japan
Lines: 38

In article <9002151430.AA11687@expo.lcs.mit.edu> kit@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Chris D. Peterson) writes:
> The app-defaults solution has the advantage of allowing the appliction
> to be internationalized w/o modifing the binary.  This separates the
> programmer from the language specialist.  Give how complex this stuff
> is becoming any separation of tasks such as this would seem to be well
> worth a bit of extra configuration headaches.  Spend the extra time
> working on an install script that does all the right things.
> 
> This is not to say that we have found the final answer, just that the
> current app-defaults technique may not be as bad as you think.
> Localization is a hard problem.

Yes, it certainly is difficult. It would be nice if we could separate
the task of the programmer from that of the language specialist, but
unfortunately it is not easy to make a clean separation.

Let's take the Japanese language as an example. It takes 16 bits to
express each character because there are thousands of them.
Fortunately, Xlib provides XDrawText16() for such character sets, and
the R4 distribution even contains at least one Japanese font
(mit/fonts/bdf/misc/k14.bdf). Clearly, the Xlib-level programmer needs
to distinguish between XDrawText() and XDrawText16(). It should be
possible for the program to find out which language the user has
chosen by looking up a certain environment variable. Of course the
application writer would not have to worry about these things if they
were neatly packaged in widgets.

What we need to do is to migrate towards conventions where text is
read from app-defaults files into ANSI C wide character wchar_t
strings, for example. Several organizations are working on standards
in this area. Perhaps some of those individuals would like to comment?

(What timing! :-)
-
-- 
Erik M. van der Poel                  erik@sra.co.jp             (Japan)
SRA, 1-1-1 Hirakawa-cho, Chiyoda-ku   erik%sra.co.jp@uunet.uu.net  (USA)
Tokyo 102 Japan. TEL +81-3-234-2692   erik%sra.co.jp@mcvax.uucp (Europe)