> DEB (Legatus Tux) will remember this ... > In a previous lifetime, I learned the value of I18N. > The good doctor had our student employees coding up 'XMITMSG' > in REXX EXECs on the CMS systems. I hated it! Oh the pain, > oh the convoluted work, just to effect an echo. [sigh] > But I learned.
Funny you should mention this -- I found a few of our old EXECs from the Workshop tapes at a site in mainland China. They translated the message repository into DBCS Mandarin, and *everything* worked properly. Not a single logic change -- not one. We built better than we knew..8-). I tell ya, though -- seing RICSTP666E in Mandarin was a really *bizarre* experience. (Easter egg time: if you happen to have the old Rice SETPRINT EXEC, do a SETPRINT FORM 666 and try to print something. You'll be amused at the response...8-)) XMITMSG was way ahead of it's time, especially when the VAR option was added (which deposited the edited message in a REXX stem). Good Stuff. > So what do we do? > Write a local 'xmitmsg' layer on top of GETTEXT? > Is there some other tool to use? > Thoughts? There are some tools in the locale packages that allow message substitution, but, as you say, they're pretty crude. If someone felt like implementing a XMITMSG clone, that might be useful. -- db
