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diff --git a/www/design.html b/www/design.html index 12c2d07d..5adae0a9 100644 --- a/www/design.html +++ b/www/design.html @@ -263,4 +263,24 @@ feeding the compiler -funsigned-char.</p> <p>The reason to pick "unsigned" is that way we're 8-bit clean by default.</p> +<p><h3>Error messages and internationalization:</h3></p> +<p>Error messages are extremely terse not just to save bytes, but because we +don't use any sort of _("string") translation infrastructure.</p> + +<p>Thus "bad -A '%c'" is +preferable to "Unrecognized address base '%c'", because a non-english speaker +can see that -A was the problem, and with a ~20 word english vocabulary is +more likely to know (or guess) "bad" than the longer message.</p> + +<p>The help text might someday have translated versions, and strerror() +messages produced by perror_exit() and friends can be expected to be +localized by libc. Our error functions also prepend the command name, +which non-english speakers can presumably recognize already.</p> + +<p>An enventual goal is UTF-8 support, although it isn't a priority for the +first pass of each command. (All commands should at least be 8-bit clean.)</p> + +<p>Locale support isn't currently a goal; that's a presentation layer issue, +X11 or Dalvik's problem.</p> + <!--#include file="footer.html" --> |