Localisation - Internationalization Package

[R.H.]

Dear Richard

Thanks a lot for the input regarding the dateFormat function. Very nice.

To add: It is also helpful to

... set the useSystemDate to true...

and then also the local date format such as dd.mm.yyyy evaluates to true
when asking if it is a date, or not.

The problem here is that thinking about different formats on different
local systems with different users who may wish to see their preferred
date/time or number formats, unifying all this under the hood may sometimes
be very important.

It is a many-to-many relationship. Looking a decimal numbers as an example:
You receive various formats of decimal numbers and must convert them to
various other formats of decimal numbers in real-time within your
application. So, you need a common ground connecting both.

That is why an internal format (system format based on how LiveCode handles
dates, numbers by default) is needed, avoiding the programmatic use of
date/time/number representations that are user level representations. Here
we have "seconds" or "dateitems" and plain text representations of numbers.

One additional remark: For translations, I have set up a separate
independent stack that allows entering, editing and displaying the content
of translation arrays (or files, lists, whatever you use for translated
strings) in which I store all translations.

Very often good and correct translations depend on context. Just
translating a term does not mean that the translated term will fit the
context for a given user interface. For such cases, I also supply a
screenshot to the translator and have it stored in the array as well, or I
describe the context with some more details.

Use descriptive keys identifying content to be translated (I use English
text strings), not numbers. Otherwise, you have to always look up what
means what.

My application is used by a large corporation that has divisions, and it is
multilingual and multi-client and therefore also muli-"locale" for the
configuration of a technical product. Users are from at least 10 different
countries using 10 different languages and different date/time and number
formats for presentation and input.

So, internationalization is a strong need in business application
development.

Thanks to all for contributions
Roland