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Re: GNAT: internationalization of error diagnosis messages


Geert Bosch wrote:

Proper translation of all GNAT messages would be a huge job requiring large ongoing maintenance efforts. Also, translation of these messages is a job that requires a detailed knowledge of the Ada language, English and the foreign target language. The messages in GNAT have been continuously improved and tweaked over the last ten years based on thousands of feedback reports of students, teachers and programmers all around the world. Also the extensive use of terms defined in the Ada standard (which is a publicly available and quite readable document) would mean that translated diagnostics would require access to a translated version of the standard. Because of this, I think no internationalization would be better than partial internationalization.

I agree. Several russian enthusiast starting translation of diagnosis messages into russian language and creating the required testsuite. I make message extractor and this patch for help them.

I believe that your patch only addresses the internationalization
of one specific kind of messages.

Patch allow internationalization primary of gnat1 messages. May be this way allow internationalization of gnatbind and gnatmake. I can't analize this. Others gnat tools use Ada.Text_IO for message output and require another way.


The biggest issue however
is that there are no comments at all to document the code.
In GNAT, every package needs comments describing the interface
at a sufficiently high level.

There are also issues with the code itself, such as the
confusing use of Message as the internationalized version
of Msg and the interface of Intl, which should not require
returning unconstrained strings.

I agree.

Maybe a good first step would be to propose a package spec
for GNAT.Internationalization or GNAT.Intl, which allows for
efficient internationalization of programs written in Ada.
Combined with Ada-aware versions of xgettext and related
utilities, this would be a very useful extension to allow
people to write programs that can be internationalized.

Existing Ada standard can't allow solve internationalization/localization problem (at least for russian-speeking countries). Only one that we may solve is a compiler message translation. And I can't want to begin more one unusable project.


-- Vadim Godunko



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