[Python-Dev] PEP 215 redux: toward a simplified consensus?

[Skip Montanaro]

    SM> What do you mean by "translators"?

    BAW> Someone who is fluent in a natural language other than English, and
    BAW> translates a catalog of English source strings to a target
    BAW> non-English natural language.  E.g.

    BAW>  "No such list: %(listname)s" -> "Non esiste la lista: %(listname)s"

So translators aren't programmers either.  Just tell them anything between
%(...) and the first alphabetic character after that is off-limits.  Again,
it doesn't look to me like a programmer problem.

Just to play the devil's advocate (and ignoring the bit about $-strings not
being i18n-friendly), I suspect non-programming translators would have just
as much trouble with something like

    $"Please confirm your choice of color ($color)..."

"$color" will look like a word to be translated.  You would have to tell
them "don't translate anything immediately following a dollar sign up to,
but not inluding the next character that can't be part of a Python
identifier."  Seems either a bit error-prone or confusing to me if I pretend
I'm not a programmer.

Skip