From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Key bindings proposal Date: Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:39:39 +0900 Message-ID: <87zkx1rdec.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <19534.1494.627000.357123@gargle.gargle.HOWL> <19537.40472.267000.563053@gargle.gargle.HOWL> <176EDAD3B9E54E39870FA3F84A5DDF3C@us.oracle.com> <19542.56658.583000.394397@gargle.gargle.HOWL> <19544.1015.468000.280770@gargle.gargle.HOWL> <87lj8nsndb.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <19545.14451.62000.682223@gargle.gargle.HOWL> <19545.19472.187000.199606@gargle.gargle.HOWL> <19545.20656.500000.91025@gargle.gargle.HOWL> <19545.24079.734000.989637@gargle.gargle.HOWL> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1280976088 3651 80.91.229.12 (5 Aug 2010 02:41:28 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2010 02:41:28 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Tom , emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Stuart Hacking Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Thu Aug 05 04:41:27 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OgqOX-0005KS-LD for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Thu, 05 Aug 2010 04:41:26 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:42053 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1OgqOM-0008Lr-03 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:41:10 -0400 Original-Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=45692 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1OgqNu-000801-CA for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:41:04 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OgqNi-00032z-Na for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:40:31 -0400 Original-Received: from mtps02.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.97.224]:57427) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OgqNi-00031A-7M for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:40:30 -0400 Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) by mtps02.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id ED003820D; Thu, 5 Aug 2010 11:40:26 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id E29B711FFC3; Thu, 5 Aug 2010 11:39:39 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: X-Mailer: VM 8.0.12-devo-585 under 21.5 (beta29) "garbanzo" ed3b274cc037 XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.6, seldom 2.4 (older, 4) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:128265 Archived-At: Stuart Hacking writes: > On 4 Aug 2010, at 17:19, Tom wrote: > > Which brings the question: is Emacs only targeted to English-speaking > > users? Internationalization is a natural feature of modern software. No, it's not "natural". Look at Wikipedia, which grows "naturally" -- and with separation of language at the top level. Localization, ie, compartmentalization, is easy and natural. But the infrastructure needs to be internationalized, which is unnatural and a lot of work. Fortunately most of that work can be done incrementally. > Just a few thoughts: > > Won't we encounter problems due to much of Emacs' UI being closely > tied to the underlying source code? Yes. But UI internationalization is a solved problem. There are some Emacs-specific problems such as "Russian Ctrl-X" (on a Cyrillic keyboard, the user doesn't think of the key as "X" -- is C-x defined by the row/column position on the keyboard, or by the label on the key?) But these are basically at the level of inconvenience (even to the Russian users, according to what I've read). The real problems are in getting LISP to be internationalized, ie, integrating string-handling with gettext. Should concat look up strings? Should the LISP interpreter do it when passing args? etc. That is a fairly delicate design problem. > Even in software that is localised, the source code is usually in > English. Emacs goes a step further by having much documentation > written inline with the code. > > A lot of the emacs documentation comes from source code > doc-strings, command names, arguments. As I see it, we could at > best hope for partial localisation. It would be a large effort to > achieve 100%. Docstrings are a solved problem, by gettext. Even translating them is a solved problem, there are several projects which will help, and it can be done incrementally. Ditto Info files and the like. > I think there would be not insignificant changes to the build > process and possibly some re-architecturing where string management > is concerned. Is there a big demand for localisation? I don't think either the build process or string storage is a big issue. There may be technical issues in the latter due to string compaction in garbage collection, but they're probably pretty straighforward. Yes, there is a big demand for localization. Most Japanese and Chinese programmers speak English very poorly, and read it only with a fair amount of effort. Even a surprisingly large number of Indians have some trouble with English. If Uday Reddy is right that many users means many recruits, well, there are probably 50 million potential users Emacs could reach with better localization.