Re: Internationalization of Lua

[mathieu stumpf guntz <psychoslave@...>]

Hello everybody,

I'm progressing, slowly but surely, on this Lua internationalization project. So far, on the relexicalisation branch, I implemented the load of a file containing Esperanto alias definitions like `se = 'if'`. This is really a prototype, as

• the file name is hardcoded, 
• it uses a global variables to pass the alias array and its length around
• the file is read with a loosy fscanf "parsing"

But still, it works, the file is loaded at runtime, and the defined aliases for reserved keywords are well alliased.

Now the next steps are

• load the file as a lua interpreted code
• expose a runtime function which enable to load the table
  

My initial idea was that the Lua script containing the aliases should return a key/value table, and that the exposed function would take a path to such a file. On the other hand, the code could simply look for some variable like `__i18n.reserved_keyword_aliases` in the current environement. Users might then affect it with table defined in their code or loaded as any other Lua code.

Feedback would be welcome on this.

Also I plane to let users load several alias tables. To avoid ambiguity, their should be precedence mechanism. One way to do it would be to make `__i18n.reserved_keyword_aliases` itself an array, that is:

__i18n.reserved_keyword_aliases[0]["si"] = " if" -- conjunction used to introduce a condition or choice in some languages
si true then print('si!') end -- print 'si!'
__i18n.reserved_keyword_aliases[1]["si"] = " :" -- reflexive pronoun in some languages
si true then print('si!') end -- print 'si!' -- error, "si" now return ":", as the previous affectation have a greater precedence
a.e=function(i) print(i) end; a si e() --  print something like table: 0x556800b889d0
__i18n.reserved_keyword_aliases[1]["si"] = nil -- forget that, now "si" will alias "if" again

-- Also a table grouping aliases by language code could an other way to group that, with a special key for precedence
__i18n.reserved_keyword_aliases["zh"]["if"] = "如果"
__i18n.reserved_keyword_aliases["zh"]["precedence"] =  0

But that would create ability to introduce equal precedence groups.


Any feedback is welcome. 

Le 29/11/2016 à 14:12, mathieu stumpf guntz a écrit :

Great, thank you. That also should able to ease the internationalization by making direct locale numbers some syntactic sugar for their quoted counterpart. Does this functionality also take into account things like Indian and Eastern Arabic numerals?

Le 29/11/2016 à 12:45, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo a écrit :

You need to set the locale inside Lua:

	% lua
	Lua 5.3.3  Copyright (C) 1994-2016 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
	> os.setlocale"fr_FR"
	fr_FR
	> "3,14" + 1
	4,14

os.setlocale("") is a better solution because it reads the locale from
the environment:

	env LC_NUMERIC="fr_FR.UTF-8" lua
	Lua 5.3.3  Copyright (C) 1994-2016 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
	> os.setlocale("")
	en_US.ISO8859-1/en_US.ISO8859-1/en_US.ISO8859-1/fr_FR.UTF-8/en_US.ISO8859-1/en_US.ISO8859-1
	> "3,14" + 1
	4,14