Re: gettext and plurals

[Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@xxxxxxxx>]

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. 

Fortunately the C library provides strftime() so you don't have to use
gettext for translating dates.

I found the description of ngettext() in the CVS files that I
mentioned earlier, but this refers to the GNU gettext manual. Where
can that be found? The version at
http://www.gnu.org/manual/gettext/index.html is antique.

Edmund
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