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Issuing a message in the language of the user

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I was going to add this to the existing thread about formatting numbers as 
it is related but it is really a topic in itself so am posting separately. I 
will focus on expressing this in C terms and will use C in the examples.

The idea is that a program wants to issue a message to a user (using a 
function which for the sake of giving it a name in this post I will call 
IssueMsg) but doesn't want to have to know what language the user speaks or 
what other locale settings are in effect. The message should appear in 
English to an English speaker, French to a French speaker etc. The IssueMsg 
routine is to look up the message in a library of the appropriate language 
for the user and then fill-in the parameter values supplied by the program.

This is akin to gettext() but, of course, much better. ;-)

Regarding the need for the order of values in a message to vary, a 
two-parameter message in English might have parm 1 first then parm 2 but the 
same message in French might be more naturally expressed by having parm 2 
come before parm 1. Rather than forcing the same order on all languages the 
message needs to pick the parameter for each location. This means that the 
message text cannot just use them in order but needs to have numbered or 
named parameters. Numbered is more efficient and was chosen for the 
suggestion below.

Therefore, to process the message there needs to be a table of parameters. A 
Posix extension to C's printf family apparently allows numbered parameters 
but I cannot see how that could be implemented easily using va_arg which is 
the only standard mechanism I am aware of in C for processing variable 
length argument lists.

So, rather than the normal printf form

  printf(message, parms);

the idea is for a program to send the message to a user by the following 
form of call

  IssueMsg(N, parms, message);

N would state how many parms there were. The parms would normally be pairs 
of

  "formatting code", value

but individual parms could be more complex if required as long as they were 
parseable.

The message would be something that could be looked up in a library for the 
current human language. The message text, regardless of human language, 
would refer to numbered parameters from the table. In other words IssueMsg 
would build the table first. Then it would scan the message substituting the 
arguments at the appropriate points.

In this way it would be easy, when processing the message, to refer back to 
numbered parameter entries in the table.

Having the number of table entries first would allow the table to be 
allocated in one go by the IssueMsg routine. It could be malloced or could 
even be put on the stack as long as each entry is of fixed size.

Where all this relates to the original thread is in the choice of 
"formatting code" elements. I won't bore you with what little I have done on 
that so far but it might be possible for both to use the same formatting 
code language.

James

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Thread

Issuing a message in the language of the user "James Harris" <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2014-04-27 20:29 +0100
  Re: Issuing a message in the language of the user "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> - 2014-04-28 09:24 +0200
  Re: Issuing a message in the language of the user "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnothavet.cqm> - 2014-04-28 03:45 -0400
    Re: Issuing a message in the language of the user "James Harris" <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2014-04-28 18:15 +0100
      Re: Issuing a message in the language of the user "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2014-04-28 19:09 +0100
      Re: Issuing a message in the language of the user "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnothavet.cqm> - 2014-04-28 20:33 -0400
  Re: Issuing a message in the language of the user "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2014-04-28 09:52 +0100
    Re: Issuing a message in the language of the user "James Harris" <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2014-04-28 19:17 +0100
      Re: Issuing a message in the language of the user "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2014-04-29 22:17 +0100
        Re: Issuing a message in the language of the user "James Harris" <james.harris.1@gmail.com> - 2014-04-29 23:21 +0100
  Re: Issuing a message in the language of the user George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2014-04-28 12:27 -0400

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