Re: AM_GNU_GETTEXT weirdness

[Bruno Haible]

Marius Vollmer wrote:
> There is at least one gettext implementation in Scheme and maybe we
> could just ship that...

There's nothing wrong with emulating the C-written libintl library in a
higher-level language, in principle. Python, GNU Smalltalk, and OCaml,
for example, do this. They wrote all the necessary infrastructure
(character set converters - iconv() equivalent, and the code for parsing
and managing .mo files in memory) from scratch in their high-level language.
It's a choice of "slim vs. thick".

When libintl added extra features for Farsi and Arabic, you get them for
free by using libintl. With the emulation approach, you need to emulate
this as well, or you cannot use .mo files that make use of these features.
It's a choice of "reuse vs. reimplement".

Bruno