Re: Components we need

[Bruno Haible <bruno clisp org>]

> > > 7) POSIX regular expression handling: This is needed for handling
> > > "yesexpr" and "noexpr". We could probably copy the code directly from
> > > glibc.
> >
> > Best handled through a GNU .mo file.
>
> Sorry, I don't get you at all. Would you explain?

Sorry, I was a bit terse.

I'm not talking about PO files. Such items are in XML and shall be edited
in XML.

Only talking about the format of the binary mmapable locale data. The
GNU .mo format implements a hash table with a string as key and a string
as value. (Don't worry about empty keys and empty values: I've added an
option --use-untranslated to msgfmt that will interpret  msgstr ""
really as an empty value.) It does this well: it uses a hash table,
and it iconv()s the value to the right encoding automatically.

Therefore, for items which are purely string -> string mappings, the
obvious choice is GNU .mo format. Only for other kinds of data (like
integers, numeric data, bit tables, arrays of strings etc.) we need
to invent an ad-hoc binary locale data format.

Bruno