localizing software

[Eric Chatonet]

Hi Graham,

Le 13 juil. 07 à 20:37, Graham Samuel a écrit :

> My point is that either version of the above is preferable to writing
>
> Answer myStringConstant468
>
> In other words, the author should still use meaningful names for  
> his/her strings in his/her own native language, otherwise all  
> coding will have to be done with a dictionary, which takes away  
> some of the charm of the human-readable scripting language which we  
> all know and love. I suppose this is really saying that what Eric  
> calls the ID of the text string should clearly remind the developer  
> what the string was intended to say.
>
> I hope other people agree with this approach.

 From a productive point of view, I am not sure to agree ;-)
In the app we have in beta tests, we use about 6000 strings (1000  
strings in six languages) and of course, the same string can be used  
in several places.
So I don't think possible to keep a meaningful name for each of the  
1000 strings...
I would need a lot of imagination, a big dictionary and my memory  
would not enough :-)

So I prefer to act as follows:
I have my Rev project and Excel always open at the same time.
As soon as I create a new button for instance, I need a label.
I create the label in Excel:

2258<tab>Quick links<tab>Liens rapides<tab>etc.
i.e. ID<tab>English<tab>French<tab>etc.

And I feed my code with this ID in Rev.
I reserve a range from 1000 to 1100 for the most common used strings  
("OK", "Cancel", etc.) and I know these by heart...
Using an Excel sheet (saved as text) is very handy because you may  
sort lines, search, etc.
And when you have 6000 strings, not having these tools would be  
really painful.

My two cents.

Best regards from Paris,
Eric Chatonet.
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