Re: gettext and plurals

[towo@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

From: 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. 
Placement of data in or behind sentences is a different issue than 
formatting the data itself.

Thomas Wolff
-
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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