Re: No, I speak English :P [Re: A chance to help]

[Cyrille Chepelov <cyrille chepelov org>]

Le Sat, Aug 22, 2003, ï 03:03:48AM +0100, Alan Horkan a ïcrit:
 
> Programming in American, even if the Gnu standard mandates it is simply a
> bad idea.

There are very good reasons for this. Look for instance at SPIP, a very,
very good content management framework. It's almost never used outside
of the French-speaking world, just because nobody except a French
speaker is able to make use of it. 
I don't think that it's not sad that people systematically use English
when they write code, I might wish they used French instead (and am
grateful they don't use Danish! though I might be fluent in Danish now
if it was the case...) but that's the state of affairs.

> countries (Japan I think).  Standard English is spoken by the majority of
> the English speaking world, thanks India ;)

Give them a few extra support outsourcing deals, and India will speak better
American than most of USA (but then, the USA won't matter much anymore).

> Americanisation like "Favorites" that you cannot get rid of, particularly
> when better terminology is available (links, or shortcuts for example, I
> may have a link to Microsoft.com but it sure as hell is not my favourite).

It's not hardcoded at all; this specific word is localised and you can
query its spelling using the GetLocaleInfo API.

> In summation, please dont change the default, create an en_US locale,
> and for any changes other than Colour to Color, please consider taking the
> time to come up with a better more neutral term.

The standard, or more exactly the body of general practices says, code for 
locale C, and the en_US locale shouldn't need more than empty .po files, and 
people came to expect that to be the case.
Of course "color" and "favorites" are a pain to the eye; that's why I said, 
any patch which changes the "C" spelling more towards the US practice would 
also be nice if it included the symmetric addition to en_GB.

I wouldn't say I really care about this issue anyway, but if little
things can be done within the English vs. English issues so that OTHER
locales can be done with less effort, I'd say this is worthwile :-)

Also, I consider a system which runs on locale=C a horribly broken system, by 
definition.

Why are you using en_GB, not en_IE as your locale? Don't they diverge at
least in the LC_CURRENCY ? :-)

        -- Cyrille

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