From dafdd587518259b431f7692b0c76a42de8e68370 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Rob Landley Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2012 23:48:15 -0500 Subject: A note on error messages and internationalization. --- www/design.html | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+) 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.

The reason to pick "unsigned" is that way we're 8-bit clean by default.

+

Error messages and internationalization:

+

Error messages are extremely terse not just to save bytes, but because we +don't use any sort of _("string") translation infrastructure.

+ +

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.

+ +

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.

+ +

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.)

+ +

Locale support isn't currently a goal; that's a presentation layer issue, +X11 or Dalvik's problem.

+ -- cgit v1.2.3