tensi@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Thomas Tensi) (06/12/89)
Most decent windowing systems (Apple Finder, GEM, MS-Windows) allow the
change of culture-specific parts (so-called resources) of a program without
recompilation.
In Apple Finder a utility called ResEdit allows to change the
appearance of requesters, the stuff in the menus (e.g. want some German
texts there?), program messages and several other stuff. In WINDOWS I
wrote a utility to extract the resources out of any Windows program into
humanly readable form (I may not distribute it by Microsoft's
intervention...). Then you can edit them and reinsert them by a program
called rc (resource compiler). Presto, you can rearrange menus or have
a totally Germanized program...
I know that the usefulness of such a thing may not be obvious to Americans
(considering that 99.99% of all programs are in English), but people in
other countries sometimes prefer programs in their own languages.
An OS-specific method to separate culture-specific things (texts or icons)
from algorithms would be fine (if it then also gets used by the programmers).
This approach also leads to clearer programs (IMHO) as interface specification
is separated from the code.
(I heard Matt Dillon is working on that; how far have you got??)
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Thomas Tensi, Institut fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen,
Arcisstr. 21, 8000 Muenchen 2, West Germany
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Thomas Tensi, Institut fuer Informatik, Technische Univ. Muenchen,
Arcisstr. 21, 8000 Muenchen 2, West Germany
| E-Mail:
| tensi@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (X.400)