Re: [Freecol-developers] My current thoughts on Plural strings

[Niklas L. <nik...@gm...>]

On 6 February 2011 14:29, Michael Vehrs <Mic...@gm...> wrote:
> The ChoiceFormat consists of two opening brackets, a tag, a selector,
> one or several choices, and two closing brackets:
>
>    {{TAG:SELECTOR|CHOICE[|CHOICE...]}}
>
> The tag determines how the selector is to be interpreted. At the
> moment, the only two tags defined are PLURAL and INDEX. In both cases,
> the selector must evaluate to an integer. In other words, it must
> either be the string representation of a non-negative decimal number
> (e.g. "3"), or a variable whose value is an integer (i.e. "%number%").
>
> If the tag is INDEX, the selector directly selects the choice with the
> same index. If the tag is PLURAL, the selector will be converted to an
> index by applying the appropriate CLDR rules first.

CLDR rules don't use numerical indexes, instead they have keys like
zero, one, two, few, many, other.

>
> If there is only a single choice, then that choice MUST evaluate to
> the key of another string template, to which the tag and selector are
> then applied. For example:
>
>    key.france={{INDEX:0|France|French|French people}}
>    key.greeting=The {{INDEX:2|%nation%}} are happy to see you.
>
> If the value of the variable %nation% is "key.france", then the
> template "key.greeting" will be expanded as follows:
>
>    (1)   The {{INDEX:2|key.france}} are happy to see you.
>    (2)   The {{INDEX:2|France|French|French people}} are happy to see you.
>    (3)   The French people are happy to see you.

Here too having string keys would aid readability a lot - and we know
translators are usually not programmers.
Would it be possible to have string keys with reasonable effort?

In general this syntax seems flexible, which is very important in
FreeCol due to how the sentences necessarily contain some lego
building. Yet it similar enough what translators might already have
seen in twn, and I guess this is pretty much the simplest solution
given the requirements.

There are few things that I'd like present that are relevant for this
discussion. Given example sentence like (4), how would the syntax go
since both the number and the target are variables. It's not obvious
from your examples. In languages that might need to combine number
with cases, how would that go?

  (4) You sold %number% %goods%.

And one more thing. In (4) %number% is the unformatted number because
it needs to be converted to plural index. However the %number% that is
displayed to the user should be formatted (thousand and decimal
separators, non-arabic numerals). How to solve this? Either provide
two variables, one formatted and one unformatted, or make the plural
indexing so that it can accept formatted numbers -- this is how
MediaWiki does it.


  -Niklas

-- 
Niklas Laxström