Re: Fwd: Re: [PHP-DEV] Woah

On Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 12:46:17AM +0300, Zeev Suraski wrote: > > Fact - gettext(foo) is much less magical and much more understandable > than _(foo). I think the problem here is that internationalization is being considered a 'separate module', rather than a core piece of functionality that PHP should account for. Right now, wrapping _() around EVERY string is only the first step. Then you have to figure out how .po files, bindtextdomain, various environment variables, and all the other stuff that gettext imposes on the system actually work. So where have the PHP ideals disappeared to in simplying this? This whole _() argument is merely a symptom of the underlying problem that internationalizing PHP scripts is really actually quite difficult and intrusive. Fix that, and this particular problem goes away. If you really believe that deprecating _() is a good thing in the context of using gettext, I find it hard to believe that you've actually implemented i8n in PHP for a large project. Personally, I've only used it when Horde switched to it, and I think I'd go mad if I had to wrap every string in the full version of gettext() ! The GNU manual expresses this pretty well: "the textual overhead per translatable string is reduced to only three characters: the underline and the two parentheses" When we're talking about every single string in your project, that's pretty significant. Anil