[Mimersbrunn-tcltk] Greetings!

[<ke...@ac...>]

Hi, my name is Kevin Kenny, and most Tcl'ers already have an idea who
I am (I've been active in the Tcl/Tk community for over ten years, and
I'm on the Tcl Core Team.)

I've quite an interest in reworking the [clock] command to adapt better
to an international environment.  There are a couple of related pieces of
work that I've been trying to co-ordinate.

(1) An open discussion on rework to the [clock] command:

    http://purl.org/thecliff/tcl/wiki/ReworkingTheClockCommand

(2) A 'calendar' module for 'tcllib' (There isn't much there yet, but
    I'm working on it, and welcome more hands!):

    http://tcllib.sourceforge.net/

The problem of translating the strings is only a small part of what
I'm trying to accomplish, as the Wiki page at (1) will show.
In fact, I've been rather thinking of the translation as more or less
a solved problem.  The International Components for Unicode project
(http://oss.software.ibm.com/) has available for free download a set
of C and C++ components that include translations of country names,
language names, date/time elements, weekday abbreviations and names,
month abbreviations and names, era names (BC = f.Kr., AD = e.Kr.)
number elements, currency elements, and time zone names into a large
set of languages -- from this set of translations, we should have only
to do file format conversions to make the message catalogs.

A larger problem is doing a parser from localized times back to the
Tcl clock; this problem, I think, will involve a total replacement
of [clock scan].  I have a lot of ideas about this and not enough time,
if anyone is interested in helping, please get in touch with me!

--
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin KENNY   GE Corporate Research & Development
ke...@ac...              P. O. Box 8, Bldg. K-1, Rm. 5B36A
                             Schenectady, New York 12301-0008 USA