Re: gettext and plurals

[Henry Spencer <henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2000, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> Adding lots of complexity to message substitution mechanisms to handle
> plurals, ordinal numbers, dates, etc. has nothing to do with user
> friendliness...

I agree with most of this, but not the "dates" part.  I'm sorry, but for
most English-speaking people, "2000-02-03" is substantially less readable
than "3rd February, 2000" or "3 Feb 2000" or even "2000-Feb-03".  Making
the *user* translate months from number to name is irritating and
error-prone, unless the month names in his language are essentially just
numbers anyway (which is true in some languages but *not* in English,
French, etc.).  The fact that this mistake is widespread does not make it
any less a mistake. 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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