Re: [RFC] automatic apostrophes

[Bruno Haible]

Robert Millan wrote:
>  - What if *printf is not suitable?  E.g. X11 applications.  Will they be
>    forced to sprintf it before passing the string to whatever function needs
>    to handle them?

Yes. sprintf or asprintf is the standard function for merging strings or
numbers into strings. X11 applications use it.

>  - Can we make the interface more generic?  Idealy, one should be able to pass
>    any string without specifiing which kind of "merging" should happen, and 
> let
>    the merging function decide itself (it could even be the same 
> function/syntax
>    for all languages, by checking which language we're using in runtime).

Basically, you want to define localized_*printf functions for every language?
Given that sprintf is already at least ca. 25 KB of code without any
locale dependent extension, how can this be made manageable?

>    For example if I want to print "en %s et saluda!", and I know that "en %s"
>    contains enough information to determine wether itself needs to be changed 
> to
>    "n'%s", I could tell this function to process "en %s" and then append
>    " et saluda!".

We need a working prototype before deciding whether such "magic processing"
is the good approach, or whether more explicit directives are better for
locale-dependent processing.

> I'm not sure if this can be archieved without requiring modifications in the
> actual code of the program we're translating.

Overriding all *printf functions is something acceptable for a program.
I wouldn't worry about that.

Bruno