Re: Internationalization of Lua

["Soni L." <fakedme@...>]

On 21/11/16 02:27 PM, mathieu stumpf guntz wrote:
> Le 21/11/2016 à 16:41, Soni L. a écrit :
> > I don't wanna learn Esperanto to write code. I'd be happy to write 
> > code on my own language, however, and have it interoperate with code 
> > written in other languages. The easiest way to do that is to define 
> > symbols for keywords - for best cultural compatibility these symbols 
> > would either a) be specific to the bastardized Lua you'd make, and 
> > would use the private use areas of unicode, or b) be emoji - and then 
> > use "environment wrapper libraries" to define the globals.
> I am happy to learn in your interest of coding in your native 
> language, that make Lua-i18n all the more relevant, and concerns you 
> are feedbacking are exactly the reason Lua-i18n is a separate project 
> from Lupa and Mallupa, on which it have no dependency. On the 
> contrary, in later development Lupa and Mallupa may rely on Lua-i18n, 
> but you don't have to care about that if you are not interesting in 
> Esperanto.
>
> Regarding what you are talking about, I agree that make having the 
> ability to make something like `_ENV = require("my_dialect")` would be 
> an interesting idea.
>
> You don't necessarily need to change tokens used internally for that 
> though: they can be decorrelated from the token exposed in the 
> interpreter. Like it's done with the solution proposed by Luiz. This 
> solution however, unlike what you are suggesting, is a static compile 
> time process. But maybe it might be used as a point of start for 
> implementing something like you are suggesting.

It's definitely a great way to make syntax highlighting impossible. 
Seems like it'd be less trouble to just use lisp or forth instead.

> > "Wrapper libraries" would be used to adapt libraries across 
> > languages, too - the "soquete" library would simply translate the 
> > names for the "socket" library, rather than reimplementing sockets in 
> > an incompatible way (however, sharing objects returned by such 
> > library would require some sort of "wrap" and "unwrap" functionality, 
> > also exposed by the wrapper library. It'd be common practice to wrap 
> > function parameters and unwrap function arguments).
> Sure this would be a good point to also provide translated libraries. 
> This doesn't really require any change to the interpreter, does it? 
> Aliasing function is straight forward in plain Lua, as far as I can 
> tell, so this might be done with the current language facility. Or is 
> there a problem I miss here?

It does need unicode support.

> Actually, the goal here is somewhat providing the same flexibility 
> given for function identifiers to reserved keywords.

Remove the concept of "keywords" - they shouldn't be words, try 
something like "keysymbols" instead.

> > If you wanna bastardize something, at least do it in a way that 
> > everyone wins. 
> Yes, that's what Lua-i18n is all about. However I would rather name it 
> allow dialectal extensions than bastardize, because "mal nommer les 
> choses c'est ajouter au malheur du monde", and that I prefer to add 
> misery in the world in a far more subtle devilish fashion. :)

I love the term "bastardize". I do it all the time. e.g. 
https://bitbucket.org/SoniEx2/mdxml/overview

> > Translating a programming language isn't the way to go, but removing 
> > any and all references to a specific language and/or culture is.
> You can abstract things, but you can't remove any and all references 
> to a specific language and/or culture. Abstracting things is obviously 
> a cultural practice. Now if you want to speak ethnology or even 
> ethology with me, please make that in a private answer.
>
> > Even Perl has yet to manage this. Actually the only programming 
> > language I know that has managed this is plain old brainfuck.
> Actually, Perligata 
> <http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/%7Edamian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html/> 
> let you code in a Latin dialect. Your welcome. ;)

Are you implying latin isn't a language and/or culture? Is perligata 
made of random symbols with no particular meaning arranged in a way that 
makes physical sense? (e.g. brainfuck's loop, which looks like a box - 
this is also why I think emoji is a good candidate for proper 
internationalization, as it's more physical even tho different cultures 
may associate different things to each emoji)

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