Re: [PATCH] I18n flag for msgfmt

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at sharif dot edu>]

On Wed, 2004-01-07 at 15:52, Bruno Haible wrote:
> You're right. I'll employ this solution in the next gettext release,
> with only a minor modification: The translators will write
>   "%<OUTDIGITS>d"
> instead of
>   "%Id"

That will be a little hard to comprehend for translators, and
specifically since the text will usually appear in a right-to-left
context, applying the bidirectional reordering to it makes it very
unreadable (when editing a PO file using KBabel for example). Think
about mirrored bracket: in this case only the first will be swapped,
making the translated message appear like:

	..... OUTDIGIT>d>% .....

(where dots are right-to-left characters). A simple %Id will just become
        ..... Id% .....

which is much more easier to read and write.

> This is because
>   - The %I flag is not backed by a standard. If some future C standard
>     reserves %I for a different purpose, glibc would have to change,
>     and msgfmt would have to emit a warning, and all Persian .po files
>     would have to be changed... (This already happened with %L a few
>     years ago.)

Well, glibc will also need to make the switch then. It will be fine with
us as the main user/developer community to switch everything then to a
new prefix (but without any bidi-neutral chars, please).

I guess we will very shortly follow this up with POSIX et al to make
sure such a thing ('I' prefix for local digits) would be done there.

roozbeh