Re: speaking of strings...

From: Daniel A. Koepke (dkoepke@circlemud.org)
Date: 04/24/02


On Mon, 22 Apr 2002, Edward J Glamkowski wrote:

> There's a lot of strings in the code - since so much of it is already
> outside the code (lib/text, world files, etc.), might it be worthwhile
> to do some resource compiler thing so the mud uses external
> stringtables?

Would it be nice?  Yes.  Would it be worthwhile?  That's in more doubt.
There are already well established tools for doing these sorts of things
in the UNIX world; see gettext(3) and msgfmt(1) for one example focused on
translations (but hackable to more general cases).

> That way someone writing a mud in some other language (like
> Canadian, appearently :)  can just edit one file for text strings

Changing the language used by the Mud requires a great deal of effort any
way you approach it.  This might be less, since it's not as spread out,
and could even open the door for user contributed contributions.  But I'm
not convinced that there's many users interested in the sort of niche that
such capabilities will fill.  In that sense, it's considerable bloat and,
depending upon the mechanism (although the aforementioned message
catalogues are pretty good), complication for little to no practical gain.

This is compounded by the fact that CircleMUD, by nature of being a lowest
common denominator TCP/IP server for interacting with telnet, is 7-bit
(real) ASCII.  The use of foreign characters in the 8-bit ASCII range is
not guaranteed to be supported by either CircleMUD or other platforms.


-dak

--
   +---------------------------------------------------------------+
   | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html |
   | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html |
   | Newbie List:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/circle-newbies/   |
   +---------------------------------------------------------------+



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 06/25/03 PDT