As you've stated, seperating content from code is a Good Idea(tm). In the same fashion it may be wise to seperate month-names from your code.

Personally, I like the idea of using xml for this job (because there ready-made modules for reading in your data).

Here's an example using an xml file (which you can find here) containing month-names for various languages. Accessing the names is roughly the same way as arturo's example above:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use XML::Simple;

my $xml = XMLin("./months.xml");

for my $lang (qw(en nl de fr)) {
        print $xml->{$lang}{month}[8],"\n";
}
[download]

However, do be aware that different languages require different syntax. Dutch, for instance, has the month-day preceding the month name (e.g. "6 Februari") as opposed to "February 6". Also, in German, digits are followed with a period: "6. Februar".

There is also some performance-loss when you're constantly accessing a disk-file.

In any case it won't be perfect.

Icky.

[~]