terrell@druhi.ATT.COM (TerrellE) (07/05/89)
Many thanks for the numerous & useful suggestions about internationalization of software. I will post a summary. I was surprised to find all sorts of things that I took for granted (i.e. paper size is 8.5 * 11 in) that are not internationally recognized constants... But, to steer the conversation towards my own interests - the application that I'm considering internationalizing is an astronomy simulation & educational program. What special 'internationalizations' are necessary for this type of application? Thanks in advance, Eric Terrell (att!druhi!terrell)
barr@frog.UUCP (Chris Barr) (07/07/89)
Code structure is important. I did this a few years ago; we had to rip out hard-coded text & replace them with data structure strings, which were loaded (with a performance hit) from an appropriate language file, e.g. /etc/emacs/french/displays /etc/emacs/french/messages /etc/emacs/french/input_expected The user either a) specified -lang french on the command line b) filled an environment variable c) took a system default language. Text was stored in compressed files, partly to save space, partly to prevent tampering. A tool (Pacer Software's) converted ascii input files. We specified all string lengths: minimum & max. Expected input, e.g. menu choices, had to be internationalized, too. We didn't deal with Kanji or other 16-bit characters. There were 1 or 2 characters which proved impossible - I forget which. Also, I believe thousands are delimited with a decimal in Europe.