Re: IRC client for Emacs

[Richard Stallman]

    But I seem to recall that the C library's printf library has some feature
    for dealing with this already in the format specifier, e.g.

          printf ("%2$s is %1$s", "foo", "bar");
          =| bar is foo

    and wondered if this would be worth adding this functionality to emacs's
    message function as part of the basic functionality for i18n in elisp
    packages.

I think it is a good idea to add some sort of feature for this purpose.

    Given the relative infrequency of messages in irc (on the order of less
    than 1/s most of the time, often there are minutes of idle time), this is a
    non-problem for the program we're talking about at the moment.

Then we agree.  Let's not concern ourselves with the speed issue.

      I am more
    concerned about preloading the entire contents of the message catalogs into
    memory at once, rather than lazy-loading entries as they are used.

That is a good point.  What method do you propose for lazy-loading them?