Hi,
Warnocked!
Indeed :)
I posted an idea about pluralisation could be handled in a way that
would not be English-centric (Subject: interpolation
contextualisation). There were no responses to the idea. Was it so
bad? Did no one see it? Was it too un-perlish? Was the title too
horrible?
The basic idea would be to add hooks into interpolation to allow for
context suppliers and context sensors. The context sensors change
words depending on data supplied through context suppliers.
Note that even in English, if you change a noun from singular to
plural, you need to change the verb from singular form to plural form.
First of all, I think a module like this should be either perfect or not
exist at all: you won't use it after it makes the first mistake, or when
you cannot use it everywhere.
Now, to have a perfect module you need some pretty smart people to
create the base lib (dealing with natural languages is not a piece of
cake). Then you need a bunch of other people who understand what's going
on to to create and test the different language versions. I fear that at
the end you end up with a huge codebase, created by various people,
parts of which get out-of-sync or become unmaintained, and which
generally consumes a lot of memory (think about e.g. dictionaries for
irregular words - take a look at Lingua::EN::Inflect, for example) when
used, and also slows down execution. All this to save one
not-very-often-used "if... else" block. If we really want to help people
type less, why not just rename "else" to "e" ? :)
It also seems to me that I will need a module like this when my computer
does not only *ask* where I want to go today, but also *cares*. ;)
So IMHO while it's a nice idea, it's just an overkill. (And it's
definitely not about Perl6 as a language.)
- Fagzal
