Re: terminology

[John Kodis <kodis jagunet com>]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 05:58:29PM +0100, colin z robertson wrote:

> At a very, very rough estimate I'd say around 50% of programs make
> some reference to directories. As I see it, it's not really a matter
> of the number of occurences, but the number of maintainers that you
> have to contact.

How about this: rather than hard-coding terms like "file" and
"directory", we treat these as terms to be internationalized.  Then
create a series of small dialects that would be selected based on the
user's experience level.

In the same way that we currently have en_US and en_GB locales to
translate between "color" and "colour" and the like, we could create
synthetic locales like en_US-Expert, in which files are called files
and directories are called directories, and other synthetic locales
like en_US-Novice, in which files are called documents and directories
are called folders.

Does anyone know if the current i18n mechanism has some way to
provide these synthetic dialects without creating a combinatorial
explosion in the number of locales that have to be maintained?

-- John Kodis.