I am trying to add international language support to at least some of the programs I am updating. So far, I have had some interaction with Thraex regarding French and Turkish translations for some of the programs, and am very grateful for what he has provided thus far.
I am still trying to develop a good infrastructure in the programs to handle multiple languages, though -- one where I wouldn't necessarily need to be very involved in the process of adding new languages to a program. KITTEN really isn't that useful for me for multiple reasons, one major reason being that, at least as far as I can tell, it is only for C and not ASM. It also isn't very "flexible" in the types of text it can handle (e.g., it can't directly handle multiple-line strings. doesn't have flexible formatting for input parameters like numbers, doesn't really allow for manipulating things like indentation and spacing/text alignment, only handles output rather than input, etc.). Anyway, in trying to set up the environment in my programs, I have run into something of a dilemma. The LANG environment variable seems to be the "controller" of what LANGuage the user wants/prefers to see messages in. AFAIK, the LANG environment variable really wasn't used back when MS was "managing" DOS and is something relatively new that I think was "invented" by FreeDOS (though I'm not 100% sure about any of that). I've never seen any documentation, formal or otherwise, on exactly how the LANG environment variable should be used. My assumption is that what is contained int eh LANG environment variable should be a two-letter code, and an extension to this assumption is that the two-letter code should correspond to the "official" two-letter language codes as defined in ISO 639. I really, really doubt that DOS will support all of those (nearly 200) languages, but will support several of them to at least some degree. That brings me to the dilemma. In addition to the language, DOS also has three other related items: Keyboard Layouts, Countries, and Code Pages. While all of these items are highly inter-related they are also distinct and separate. The main question I have is in the two letter codes for LANGuage and their relationship to the two-letter codes for countries and keyboard layouts (code pages don't have two-letter codes). As an example, for America the two-letter country code and "standard" keyboard layout codes are US, but I'm aware of at least four other "standard" keyboard layouts that are sometimes used in America, (Dvorak, Left-handed Dvorak, Right-handed Dvorak, and Colemak), and there are also at least three other countries that use the English language (Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand). I also know that even though all these countries use English, there are dialectical differences so that something written for an American audience wouldn't necessarily be understood correctly by an Australian audience, and vice versa. Anyway, my basic question is: should it be allowed to "intermix" the two letter codes? For example, if I live in the US and want my program interactions to be in English, is the LANG environment variable required to be EN or can it also be US (or UK or AU or NZ or ...)? That is, can the LANG environment variable correspond to a country code where the "common" language is the one you want to use? I know what I think the answer _should_ be (at least if we don't want to fundamentally change how DOS handles languages and code pages and etc.), but would like to see what others think. Bret _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
