OpenEuphoria

RE: international language support

• Posted by freeplay at mailandnews.com Aug 16, 2001
• 1016 views

>===== Original Message From Irv Mullins <irvm at ellijay.com> =====
<snip>
>What about languages that read from right to left?
>Or from top to bottom?
>Doesn't that make parsing  er.. more interesting?
<snip>

Parsing isn't the issue with NLS.  NLS is a way to help you code an 
application once (single source) and have it run in as many different 
languages you have the time to translate a message catalogue into.  Not sure 
if it handles reading text right to left.  I guess you just put the message 
text in the catalog right to left.  The other biggie is character sets.

I've never coded anything with NLS so I'm no expert.  I'd guess, however, that 
the format of a message catalogue has an "english" feel to it though 

Language issues also have an effect on documentation preparation.  The source 
of a document has two main components (that I can see at any rate).  One is 
the actual text and diagrams and the other is the layout/format (lines per 
page, font size, bold, italic, etc.).  Think of the source of a HTML page - 
all the stuff within '<' and '>' characters is the layout/format and 
everything else is the text.

There must be documentation systems that allow several different versions of 
the text (each version in a different language) to be merged into one version 
of the layout/format.  It would just seem to much work to start each new 
language version of the original document from scratch.

Regards,

FP.