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Date:Mon Mar 30 15:18:36 2000 
Subject:Fw: FWD: from Jonathan Cunningham about Macintosh implementations 
From:jlc 
Volume-ID:1000330.03 

Aaron asked me to try posting this again; apparently
the gateway didn't recognise the "To: "line which (I
just checked) probably contained:
  pop-forum@cs.bham.ac.uk <pop-forum@cs.bham.ac.uk>

This is one of the (two?) common formats for putting
human readable names as well as machine readable
addresses on the "To:" line. My mail reader just
displays the bit which is not in < >. (The other
common format I know of has the human-readable bit
in parantheses, and the machine-readable bit bare.)

Apologies to those on the mailing list (like me) who
will thus get the following wibble twice.
  --jlc

(If this doesn't work, I guess I'll have to start
typing in pop-forum by hand, instead of letting the
software do it.)

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan L Cunningham <jlc@sofluc.co.uk>
To: pop-forum@cs.bham.ac.uk <pop-forum@cs.bham.ac.uk>
Date: 30 April 2000 12:12
Subject: Re: FWD: from Jonathan Cunningham about Macintosh implementations


>(Another opportunity to test your mail gateway ;-)
>
>The following is actually a more general point, which is
>still relevant to poplog now.
>
>>...
>>Another less obvious point is the large collection of strings for
>>error messages in the poplog system source files, e.g. things
>>like this in $popsrc/list_hdtl.p
>>
>>    mishap(item, 1, if item == [] then 'NON-EMPTY LIST NEEDED'
>>                    else 'LIST NEEDED' endif)
>>
>>We discussed moving all those hundreds of strings out into a file,
>>with numbers or labels and having an error mechanism which found the
>>appropriate string when an error occurred. We decided against that
>
>
>There is another advantage to removing error messages from the
>source code ... internationalisation.
>
>In developing a C++ application, modern tools make this relatively
>simple to do. (The strings aren't stored in a file, but in 
>a "string table".)
>
>Why? So it is very easy to produce different national versions of
>the product. You don't need multiple versions of the source; just
>link with a different string table. (Actually, in a graphical UI
>you may need also to take into account the length of the strings.)
>
>This is not so important for something like poplog as it would be
>for a consumer product but even so, just conceivably, people might
>like to get messages in their own language.
>
>But, nowadays, I still wouldn't use error codes. Instead, I would
>redefine prmishap to look up the error string in a separate
>table. This table could be in an ordinary library, and loaded in
>the usual way, at startup.
>
>There would be some work needed in extracting the initial
>set of "key" strings for the table, but after this had been done
>once, poplog could be nationalised to a new locale just by
>making a new version of the mishap-string-translation-library,
>i.e. anyone who could produce:
> [...
>  ['LIST NEEDED' 'Liste necessaire']
>  ...
>  ]
>or whatever the correct translation would be.
>
>This is so obvious, I wonder if it has already been done?
>
>Jonathan
>
>