[I18n-sig] Re: gettext in the standard library

[Martin von Loewis]

[Fran=E7ois Pinard]
> Near the times of the beginning of the Translation Project, the
> mentality was that a PO file could be used to translate from any
> original language to any goal language.  The original language
> being, of course, the language used by the programmer.  With only a
> few exception, I can say that almost all examples I saw or handled
> use English as the original language.  But the spirit was opened to
> the fact people could program in their own national language, and
> _then_ have translation files towards English.
>
> Currently, this opened-ness is getting reversed.  Not only the
> original language is mandated to be English in the spirit of many,
> there are now pressures for the charset in use be a small subset of
> ASCII, with some strange code already committed, for parameterising
> ASCII to Unicode conversions (I've strong and probably biased
> opinions in that debate, so better not let me try to summarising it
> here :-).  A sure thing is that it looks all wrong to me, as just
> giving in highly pedantic complexity.
>=20
> So, not only would I like that Python does it better, but I would
> welcome if Python was allowing the original language to be based on
> either ASCII or Unicode, the most transparently as possible, of
> course.

Isn't that limited by the structure of mo files? You'd somehow have to
know what encoding to use when looking into the catalog - the content
type only talks about the encoding of the translations.

Regards,
Martin