ns@pr1me.dk (Niels Sondergaard) (12/15/88)
Hi There,
I'm a great user of Free software, mostly for personal use, but also
to give away to friends and customers. Usual I can live with my
programs talking english, so can the friends, but if I give away
some handy programs to end users they expect it to be in danish.
I don't expect anyone out there to make your programs speak my
language, but I would like to encourage You to think that Your
program could end (and be used) in a country where the language
is not english.
I've found that most programmers "hardcode" texts in the programs,
(also here, which limits the programs VERY much), but with almost
no extra effort You can make "#define"'s in a header file, this would
make life much more easy when localizing.
With a little more effort You could also help a lot on writing
dates, so I wouldn't be confused if 8/9/88 is in August or September,
for all but Americans I think it would be i September, but who can
know for sure. Here in Europe we also have a little problem with
the letters in the alphabet, so please don't make assumptions on
use of special characters.
Exampel: Anders S|nderg}rd, f|dt 8/9/82
(name and birth of my son, and |} is real letters)
--
Med Venlig Hilsen (With Kind Regards)
Niels S|ndergaard,
Prime Computer A/S, Denmark.
ns@pr1me.dk, {...}!mcvax!dkuug!pr1me!ns or ns@cph-d.Prime.COMeik@os.is (Einar Kjartansson) (12/18/88)
In article <726@pr1me.dk>, ns@pr1me.dk (Niels Sondergaard) writes: > Hi There, > > I'm a great user of Free software, mostly for personal use, but also > to give away to friends and customers. Usual I can live with my > programs talking english, so can the friends, but if I give away > > I've found that most programmers "hardcode" texts in the programs, > > Exampel: Anders S|nderg}rd, f|dt 8/9/82 > (name and birth of my son, and |} is real letters) > Also allow for the use of 8 bit character codes, so we can get a way from the practice of using the ascii codes []{}\| for other symols that are not used in English. By using ISO 8859/1 codes, the same printer or video screen can support all languages used in Western Europe and North and South America. If the 8th bit is not stripped off and "unsigned char" is used in place of "char" in where comparisons are done involving characters, life would be made much easier for those of us that use languages other than english. -- Einar Kjartansson | eik@os.is Orkustofnun (National Energy Authority) | eik@geysir.uucp Grensasvegi 9, IS-108 Reykjavik, Iceland | mcvax!hafro!geysir!eik Phone: 354-1-83600 Fax: 354-1-688896 Home: 354-1-16407