Re: Translation of numeric values (application gnome-schedule)

[Åsmund Skjæveland <aasmunds fys uio no>]

P. Van Hoof:
> The application, however, must also parse crontab records like 
>
> 1 2 3 * * ls # Untitled
>
> to something readable.
>
> Would would become:
>
> At every first minute of the second hour of the third day of every
> month, run ls
>
> gnome-schedule will, at this moment, translate it to this sentence.
[...]
> Unless we use multiple lines we cannot show it the way you propose. It
> would look like this:
>
>
> Untitled | At this hour: 2             | ls |
>          | At this minute: 1           |    |
>          | At this day of the month: 3 |    |
>
> This is as hard as [raw crontab] to understand

No, it isn't. Au contraire, I think it's easier to understand than both 
the raw crontab and your example, which is a long and winding sentence 
that I have to read slowly and carefully to be sure that I understood 
correctly. The above table, on the other hand, is fairly easy to read: 
The important parts are visually separated and easy to see, with proper 
numbers, and not mungled into a long and tedious sentence.

> What I mean with that is that the user still has to compute the actual
> frequency using that thing we call 'his or her brains'. It's still not
> something a human brain can understand in a glitch. Which is IMHO the
> responsibility of a userinterface. Computers can be programmed to make
> it supersupersuper simple for people. Lets use that capacity. Even if
> that means putting some more efforts in our translations and
> translation-related code.

Neither your way or Cristian Rose's way relieves the user from the need 
to think. However, his is, IMO, less demanding.

> The usage of such multiple lines would destroy the purpose of gnome-
> schedule: To simplify the system-schedule and to make it accessible for

It's not simpler just because it doesn't have numbers.

--
Å. Skjæveland