[therion] new user ....

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 11:05:31PM +0200, Eric Madelaine wrote:

>>    Input language is a separate topic, I agree. But then, I'm not sure
>> why you would not be able to change the lexer without changing the rest
>> of the parser, and get variants for the language... (Again, I'm not
>> suggesting that you should do it)


It's possible, but it's not a sane route to go down.

The problem comes when users using different i18ns want to exchange
files (for example, CUCC shares survey data with the German cavers who
work in the same area of Austria).  Worse, what if I want to change a
survey data file sent to me in German?  I'm forced to try to understand
the German version of the file format, and either I have to make my
changes in German, or the parser will need to understand every keyword
from every language at once!

A real world example - Microsoft translated keywords in the macro
language for either Word or Excel (maybe both!) so a coworker had a fun
time translating some macro scripts we shipped to clients by installing
both versions and comparing the two manuals...)  And of course each time
the macros changed, he had to dig out the manuals, and retest everything
on the translated version.

A better approach would be to translate the keywords from english (or
some canonical form) and back to the canonical form on save.  That way
I can edit a data file from a German surveyor in English, and the
language used in the file format becomes just an implementation detail,

Cheers,
    Olly