From: Florian Mösch <fmoesch_at_web.de>
Date: Tue, 03 Sep 2002 16:57:37 +0200

> Because it is not made for embedded use with a slow CPU and very
> little memory.
> Any further questions? ;-)

Yes.

You are right. The GNU gettext library is not made for a SH-1 CPU.
But the message catalog files' format is not only platform independant
and simple structured but also supprted by a *lot* of tool which help
the translators. I honor your offer to write all the tools needed for a
proprietary format, but I think you should think about using a well
tested and supported format for the catalog files. It is not necessary
to implement the whole gettext library. But this approach already
adresses some things that have not been mentioned here before. Only one
example from gettext documentation:

  Assume we have the code
    printf("String `%s' has %d characters\n", string, number)
  A possible German translation for the above string might be:
    "%d Zeichen lang ist die Zeichenkette `%s'"
  A C programmer, even if he cannot speak German, will recognize that
  there is something wrong here.

I don't think that we should even try to implement all those features at
once. But I still believe using a format which is already supported by
helper applications for the translator would be a good idea.

   Florian.
Received on 2002-09-03