On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 10:30:38AM -0400, John Kodis wrote: > On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 05:58:29PM +0100, colin z robertson wrote: > > > At a very, very rough estimate I'd say around 50% of programs make > > some reference to directories. As I see it, it's not really a matter > > of the number of occurences, but the number of maintainers that you > > have to contact. > > How about this: rather than hard-coding terms like "file" and > "directory", we treat these as terms to be internationalized. Then > create a series of small dialects that would be selected based on the > user's experience level. A minor point: it's not really about experience level. It's more a matter of how comfortable they are with abstractions. ... or something along those lines, anyway. I'm not a psychologist. > In the same way that we currently have en_US and en_GB locales to > translate between "color" and "colour" and the like, we could create > synthetic locales like en_US-Expert, in which files are called files > and directories are called directories, and other synthetic locales > like en_US-Novice, in which files are called documents and directories > are called folders. Yes, it had occurred to me that this was theoretically possible, but even if there are no software problems I'm a little cautious about pursuing it in this case. It would increase complexity and would require another set of translations to be made. (While expert <-> novice translations would be significantly easier than for another language, they still would not be safely automatable.) Bear in mind that programs are not the only parts of the system that need translation. I don't really like the idea of having to provide documentation for both classes of user. My feeling at this point is that by sheer weight of numbers the "folder" supporters have won. So it's now a matter of spreading the word among developers. colin _____________________________ ____ rtnl http://rational.cjb.net c z robertson ndirect co uk icq 13294163
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