[squeak-dev] When did Scratch diverge?

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Tue Aug 6 19:27:43 UTC 2013


On 06-08-2013, at 1:57 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> You missed that I make a distinction between "i18n" (how to translate between English and Other Human Languages) and the rather technical aspect of how to represent strings with more than 8 bits per character.

Fair enough; it's all unfamiliar enough to me that it looks like one big hairy ball of nastiness. The Scratch translation system is a fairly simple dictionary lookup, so at least that part makes sense!

> For both of these Scratch has a solution different from main Squeak, but I'm saying the best way forward is to use Squeak's strings with Scratch's translation framework.

OK, I can see virtue in that. I don't currently have a clue how non-english/ascii characters get handled in the Squeak system but I suppose we'll crash into that bridge when we come to it…

Squeak has BytesString and WideString. I'm going to make a wild guess that WideString is for use as UTF32 encoding of unicode, and that ByteString is usable for 'plain old ascii' and UTF8 encoded unicode?


> A third part is displaying the translated strings for which I'd continue to use Scratch's way, at least for the time being.

I *think* that one advantage of using the Squeak string classes should be that StringMorph already handles them properly, rather than having to fudge in the rather ugly Scratch modifications. I'm not sure about right-to-left languages though - are they supposed to be handled? There's a fair bit of if-this draw one way, if the-other draw differently, unless the magic-unicode-direction-char says otherwise and it's a blue moon on Thursday.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Base 8 is just like base 10, if you are missing two fingers.




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