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A native XPG4 implementation (kind-of)

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 29 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 29 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



I wanted to implement the latest SRFI-29 draft on top
of the standard
XPG4 UNIX i18n support.  However, I ended up
implementing something
slightly different.  The (Scheme 48) code is at
http://gofree.indigo.ie/~dbane/

Here are the main differences:

*  The test code did everything - creating the message
catalogues,
   then reading them and printing the messages.  I
split this into
   make-vsrfi-29-cat to actually build the message
catalogue source.
   Then a Makefile can compile this into binary
catalogues.  Then
   vsrfi-29 can read these and print the messages.

   I know that Scheme is supposed to be written
interactively, but I
   wouldn't like to exclude users of the likes of
Stalin or Bigloo
   either.  They'll be using offline compilation, and
splitting the
   code like above is the best way I can see to
support this.  I'd
   like this behaviour to be explicitly allowed in an
implementation.

*  I don't implement store-bundle.  declare-bundle!
stores the
   catalogue source (i.e. not readable by load-bundle!
without
   processing) as well.  If load-bundle! fails, it IS
an error.

   Again, this is motivated by the same concerns.

*  Instead of taking a symbol message ID,
localized-template takes an
   integer.  It's most likely my inexperience with
Scheme, but I had
   to put in an (evil :-)) eval to convert from one to
the other
   inside the SRFI-29 implementation itself.

*  current-language and current-country don't actually
affect the
   messages used.  The way to specify this in XPG4
under OpenBSD is
   the NLSPATH environment variable (e.g. mine is
   $HOME/scm/nls/$LC_MESSAGES).  Still, I implemented
it, as programs
   might find it useful.

One other point which I thought was badly specified
was
current-locale-details.  I think implementers are
given so much
latitude as to make it useless.  I'd suggest making it
manipulate an
alist instead of a list of symbols, and have the same
keys as fields in
the C struct lconv (see the localeconv or setlocale
man page).

=====
Darren Bane

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