Re: Go for ultimate localization!

From: Francois Pottier (Francois.Pottier@inria.fr)
Date: Fri Oct 29 1999 - 11:44:07 MET DST


Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 11:44:07 +0200
From: Francois Pottier <Francois.Pottier@inria.fr>
To: matias@k-bell.com
Subject: Re: Go for ultimate localization!
In-Reply-To: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=3C38188EFB.80C29974=40k-bell.com=3E=3B_from_Mat=EDas?=

> Localizing the language is not that difficult, but it would involve
> exposing the abstract syntax to the localizer, and the localizer would
> have the difficult task of rewriting the parser.

I would like to point out that this has been done by Apple in their
AppleScript scripting language. It looks cool at first sight, but it
means that textual programs are no longer portable, since the machine
you're moving to may not use the same language as yours. So, only the
(binary) abstract syntax tree is portable, which is (IMHO) a very bad
thing, since maintaining compatibility across versions of the language
becomes very difficult.

-- 
François Pottier
Francois.Pottier@inria.fr
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~fpottier/



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