i18n for gfortran-compiled code (or Fortran in general)

[Dennis Wassel <dennis dot wassel at googlemail dot com>]

Hi list,

I have recently been thinking about adding i18n to our existing
Fortran/C library at work. Since our primary compiler is gfortran, I
hope this is an acceptable place to ask.

What I am thinking about is rather simple string localisation, limited
to "non-extraordinary" languages in and around Europe and America, no
LTR/RTL stuff, and no Asian glyphs. Think English, German, Spanish,
Turkish, for instance.
It is primarily supposed to cooperate peacefully with gfortran and the
existing machinery under various platforms (linux, *nix, windoze,
mac), and it would need to have a "switch off" feature in favour of a
default English fallback. Non-too-fancy preprocessor tricks are
acceptable, since all source files are preprocessed anyway.

What I found out so far:
* Asking google for "Fortran i18n" and the like more or less only
tells me that FX pushed this for gfortran.
* gettext is probably too C-centric for it to integrate peacefully,
and it is GPL, so unacceptable for our code anyway.
* gfortran >= 4.4 has some plumbing for wide characters in place,
though not for UTF-8. Then again, UCS-4 is surely enough for my
purposes.

Has anyone ever run across a swiss army-knife ("eierlegende
Wollmilchsau", "schaap met vijf poten", ...) like this?
I'll happily accept that this might be futile and foolish, but before
burying the idea right away, at least I wanted to pick the brains of
the more experienced (G)Fortraner's here.

Thanks for any input, idea or random thought on this!
Dennis