On 2012-02-20 20:49, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 08:36:56PM +0100, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
On 2/20/12, Juan Manuel Cabo<[email protected]> wrote:
will be trouble. Instead please do:
"The '%1$s' file's size is %2$d which is wrong"
That is the shittiest formatting specifier ever invented. The
unreadability of it is why I never, ever, use it. Python solved this
nicely with its {0} {1} syntax:
print '{0} and {1}'.format('foo', 'bar')
Actually, even that isn't ideal. How is the translator to know what on
earth {0} and {1} are? Sometimes you need to know in order to make a
good translation. This would be even better:
"The ${file}'s size is ${size}, which is wrong"
The usefulness of named arguments is even more apparent in complex
message like this one:
"${file}:${line}: Expecting ${expectedtoken}, got ${inputtoken}"
Without named parameters, you'd have:
"{0}:{1}: expecting {2}, got {3}"
which is almost impossible to translate. What are {0} and {1}? What are
{2} and {3}? Does it mean "12:30pm: expecting program to succeed, got
general protection fault"?
Using named parameters makes it clear this is a parser error, not
something else. This difference may mean using a completely different
grammatical structure to translate the message.
T
Ruby on Rails uses name parameters:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html
--
/Jacob Carlborg
