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internationalization


Let me dump core on another xconq dream of mine: internationalization.

It can be approached on different levels; a relatively simple task
would be to add portable support for non-ASCII characters.  A first
step would be to support iso-8859-1; this would be enough to make me
happy for a while. ;-)  Typing in 8-bit chars already works on
X11/curses (with proper fonts), but I guess that some translation
gimmick is needed to make this work on the Mac (I doubt that character
203 is E-umlaut there).  I have a map of Italy and nearby lands
c. 1400, but I can't do without e.g. the circumflex accent in Cīteaux
(otherwise the monks must be called Citercians).  BTW, the period
which goes with the map, codenamed "condottieri", is bogged down by
the lack of sieges. 

The most interesting thing would be text generation in many languages.
Now in nlang.c we have the comment
/* This file should be entirely replaced for non-English Xconq. */
But it's not as simple as that. 

In Italian, French, etc., e.g. an adjective must match the gender and
number of the noun; therefore as a minimum every noun must have a
gender and number propery (for every language), and every adjective
must have male, female... singular, plural... forms.  German and
Russian (and Latin) are even harder, and I don't know anything about
Japanese or Shwaili.  A similar (or harder) thing for verbs.

The sort of stuff I am dreaming of is like

(unit-type submarine
   (name (english "battleship")
         (italian "corazzata" (plural "corazzate") (gender female))
))

(side 1
    (adjective (english "Russian")
               (italian (singular (male "russo") (female ("russa")))
                        (plurar   (male "russi") (female ("russe"))))
))

so you can generate all kind of "la corazzata russa Potėmkin", 
"2 sommergibili russi" and so on...

With this kind of GDL support in place, it would be easy (if boring)
to write nlang-it.c etc.

Ciao,
	Massimo


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