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.
Before there was a web, we were all in search of the CWIS grail.
There was Gopher. It seemed like a good idea to have a gopher client
on CMS (Pipelines, REXX, ... all these things made it a fun project).
Of course, when someone outside the US wants to use your toy
you want to accomodate them, so I was encouraged to try XMITMSG.
CMS Gopher was, to my knowledge, the only gopher client
that was fully internationalised.
I came to love XMITMSG.
Still use it today even for simplistic scripts
where you would think it's not worth the effort.
I learned. I changed. You call me "ar" ... bah!
Then we all turned to UNIX,
but I did not find a UNIX equivalent of 'xmitmsg'.
There does exist GETTEXT, for which GNU GETTEXT looks like a
largely POSIX compliant replacement. But ... it seems to be
missing something: token replacement. In the CMS message tool
xmitmsg 29 "AAA" "BBB"
would replace &1 and &2 in the repository
with the strings supplied on the call. (And of course,
you could always have a varying number of replaceable tokens.)
Maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see this capability in GETTEXT.
What I see is phrase translation. No, no ... that's not what we need.
Better to have "message number such-and-such" which gets localised
in context than to have feeble attempts at string equivalence.
Context! Express the message in context!
So what do we do?
Write a local 'xmitmsg' layer on top of GETTEXT?
Is there some other tool to use?
Thoughts?
Otherwise, y'all have a Merry Christmas -- Sir Santa
