Hi, Guix users!

Currently I'm putting my energy into Guix l10n(zh_CN). However, there's
a serious flaw in current implementation of l10n.

AFAFIK, Guix use format in (ice-9 format) to format the the template
string return by `G_`. The template string of (ice-9 format) looks
similar to the format template defined in ANSI CL, which only supports
format arguments **one by one**.

In CJK languages, word order usually different from English.

For example. consider message

  "could not find bootstrap binary '~a' for system '~a'"

We mark first ~a as %1 and mark second as %2. It should be translated
into Chinese like this

  "无法找到用于引导 %2 系统的二进制文件 %1"

But currently it looks to be impossible because we can't refer
to positional argument in format template.

My suggestions is we can create a new format function supports refer to
positional argument like

  (pos-format "~3 ~2 ~1" "foo" "bar" "baz") ;; => "baz bar foo"

And replace `format` in l10n with `pos-format` step by step. Maybe we
can create a function to combine `G_` and `format` so we can change its
implement detail without breaking existing code.

Please leave your comment on my opinion, thanks :)


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Retrieve my PGP public key:

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Zihao