In the early 90's, for an embedded PC that controlled a scanning densitometer, I came up with a C++ class that fit our needs.

An associative array was indexed by a string value, which could have some nmenonic value to the code it's called from, and is easier to make unique and maintain in a large program than sequencial ID numbers as favored by MicroSoft.

The "hash" was populated from a translation file at program startup. The format of the file was the key followed by each available translation.

I liked the idea of having all translations of one string together, rather than a different file for each language like some schemes. I think Win32's language stuff (using FormatMessage, not the string table resource) works that way too, but is not nearly as powerful. FormatMessage has the dynamic positioning of strings like you mention; I don't remember how my old program handled that.

In a modern Perl solution, I think we can address the dynamic ordering easily enough:

If you pulled in the string with a function call, such as $x->format ($a,$b,$c); and the string contained markers $1, $2, and $3, you get the idea. But function calls don't interpolate in Perl 5, so using a tied hash for syntactic sugar might help.

I'd also like to see the format function automatically take care of changes based on the actual paramters, such as number and gender. E.g. $x->format(17) would cough up "There were 17 files processed." but $x->format(1) would produce "There was 1 file processed". Changes in words due to singular/plural is so common that an escape code could specify that. E.g. the translation string holds 'There $?n1(were,was,were) $1 file$?n1(,,s) processed.'. $ followed by digit is a substitution. $? followed by code/flags/etc then digit is fancy stuff: ?n for "number", followed by forms for zero,singular,plural cases.

—John

In reply to Re: Re: Re (tilly) 1: Perl Programs That Support Multiple (Human) Languages by John M. Dlugosz
in thread Perl Programs That Support Multiple (Human) Languages by John M. Dlugosz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.