[Mono-devel-list] Small change in handling string localization

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> Only a small change:
> Right now the Locale class resides inside the System.Globalization
> namespace.
> 
> I would do the following:
> Move Locale class to the Assembly directory (where available) and remove the
> namespace for Locale class
> This has the following advantages:
> 1. You can use Locale.GetText from any class without having to add a using
> System.Globalization statement (we would have to add this to every class
> that wants to localize something, which will be practically every class in
> some namespaces.
> 2. We get rid of the System.Globalization namespace which does natively only
> exist in corlib, but in no other assemblies.
> 
> If nobody objects I'll make the change for the system assembly (The change
> should not break existing code)

This sounds ideal.

Then we have three options (and I dont care which route we go) about the class:

	* Option 1: Keep the name of the class as Locale, and the routine
	  called GetText, and then in classes that want to do translations,
	  we can do the same trick that nunit-gtk does, which is that 
	  each class defines a helper routine:

		static string _ (string s)
		{
			return Locale.GetText (s);
		}

	  This is to make the code look more like what the C people are used
	  to deal with for translations, and we could use the small
	  perl script that lives in nunit-gtk/src/getstrings.pl for that

	* Option 2: We partially like the use of underscores, but we dont
	  want to create too many functions, so we rename class "Locale"
	  to class "L", like this:

		
		internal class L {
			// this is used to translate strings.
			public static string _ (string s)
			{
				...
			}

			// This is used to "tag" strings historically
			public static string N_ (string s)
			{
				return s;
			}
		}

	   And our code would use it like this:

		Console.WriteLine (L._ ("Hello World"));

	* Option 3: Maybe the best: we keep things how they are, and
	  we manually do:

		Console.WriteLine (Locale.GetText ("Hello World"));

My vote goes for 3, but I have seen the other two being used.

Miguel