Number to Words and licencing

[John Ralls]

On Nov 3, 2013, at 11:14 AM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:

> On Sunday 03 November 2013 08:01:38 John Ralls wrote:
>> On Nov 3, 2013, at 2:32 AM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> 
> wrote:
>>> And that's only three languages that I know. I'm sure many other
>>> languages have still different ways to form larger numbers. These
>>> oddities in languages can't be covered in only with gettext as far
>>> as I know, or you will have to add quite a lot of individual
>>> numbers to translate.
>> 
>> ICU has that built in and localized:
>> userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/numbers
>> But note:
>> "ICU provides number spellout rules for several locales, but not for
>> all of the locales that ICU supports, and not all of the predefined
>> rule types. Also, as of release 2.6, some of the provided rules are
>> known to be incomplete."
>> 
>> But I see no reason to add the dependency for something that's already
>> done via gettext.
>> 
> This is the part I don't understand. How can gettext handle all the 
> different number spellout rules ?

Sorry, I misunderstood what you meant in " These oddities in languages can't be covered in only with gettext as far as I know”, reading it as “these oddities … can be covered only with gettext…”. Quite the opposite of what you meant.

I also failed to catch that in spite of all of the comments in gnc-ui-utils.c, none of the strings are actually submitted to gettext, which is explained with Christian’s comment about the integer_to_string function being untranslatable.

Sigh.

So we *can* do that only in English.

So I guess the question is do enough non-english speakers actually need it? The Wikipedia article Thomas cited earlier suggests not, but perhaps you have more direct knowledge otherwise.

With that answered, do we want to bring in ICU as a dependency to meet the requirement. The documentation of that class is not up to the standards of some others, and I wasn’t able to figure out what locales are actually supported.

Regards,
John Ralls