Near-duplicate strings in programs ("Open", "_Open" etc.)

[Åsmund Skjæveland <aasmunds student matnat uio no>]

A suggestion for the applications of the future:

Many programs have lots of near-duplicate strings that differ only by
'_' or '.'. For example, both 'Open' and '_Open' are listed in most
programs. Also, many GConf description schemas have a 'long' and
'short' description that sometimes only differs in that the long ends
with a period, while the short one doesn't.

Can't these near-duplicates be merged somehow? For example
(pseudocode):

g_menu_item(item, _("_Open"));
g_menu_item_desc(item, strrep(_("_Open"), "_", ""));

I.e., instead of merking both "Open" and "_Open" in source as
translatable, mark only "_Open" and remove the "_" from the
translation as needed.

I'm not saying this is a huge problem, but the less duplicate strings,
the better.

-- 
Åsmund Skjæveland {
   aasmunds fys uio no
}