Number to Words and licencing

[Thomas Troesch]

I have been looking at the list of open bugs for check printing.  Bug
626001 asks for number to words based on locale.

One approach would be to provide for locale specific plug-ins or code
paths.  For a programmer its a simple way to think about it, but I don't
know how well that would work with translators.

I found some open source code that has a rule based parser to support
NLSnumber translations.  The rules themselves may be too much for the
typical
translator.

Before I dig into it to see if it would work for checks ( looks promising
), I'd like to have an opinion regarding license compatibility.

>From the web ( icu-project.org ):
"The ICU projects since ICU 1.8.1 and ICU4J 1.3.1 are covered by the ICU
license <http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/icu/trunk/license.html> ,
a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with
the GNU GPL.".  The license is at "http://source.icu-project.org/repos/icu/
icu/trunk/license.html".  The function that I'm interested in is described
at "RuleBasedNumberFormat" at the bottom of "http://userguide.icu-
project.org/formatparse/numbers".  Class documentation is at "http://icu-
project.org/apiref/icu4c/classRuleBasedNumberFormat.html".

I have no intuition as to whether bringing in a lump of code like this
would make sense.  Opinions and insight welcome.

Thomas