I wanted to implement the latest SRFI-29 draft on top
of the standard
XPG4 UNIX i18n support.  However, I ended up
implementing something
slightly different.  The (Scheme 48) code is at
http://gofree.indigo.ie/~dbane/

Here are the main differences:

*  The test code did everything - creating the message
catalogues,
   then reading them and printing the messages.  I
split this into
   make-vsrfi-29-cat to actually build the message
catalogue source.
   Then a Makefile can compile this into binary
catalogues.  Then
   vsrfi-29 can read these and print the messages.

   I know that Scheme is supposed to be written
interactively, but I
   wouldn't like to exclude users of the likes of
Stalin or Bigloo
   either.  They'll be using offline compilation, and
splitting the
   code like above is the best way I can see to
support this.  I'd
   like this behaviour to be explicitly allowed in an
implementation.

*  I don't implement store-bundle.  declare-bundle!
stores the
   catalogue source (i.e. not readable by load-bundle!
without
   processing) as well.  If load-bundle! fails, it IS
an error.

   Again, this is motivated by the same concerns.

*  Instead of taking a symbol message ID,
localized-template takes an
   integer.  It's most likely my inexperience with
Scheme, but I had
   to put in an (evil :-)) eval to convert from one to
the other
   inside the SRFI-29 implementation itself.

*  current-language and current-country don't actually
affect the
   messages used.  The way to specify this in XPG4
under OpenBSD is
   the NLSPATH environment variable (e.g. mine is
   $HOME/scm/nls/$LC_MESSAGES).  Still, I implemented
it, as programs
   might find it useful.

One other point which I thought was badly specified
was
current-locale-details.  I think implementers are
given so much
latitude as to make it useless.  I'd suggest making it
manipulate an
alist instead of a list of symbols, and have the same
keys as fields in
the C struct lconv (see the localeconv or setlocale
man page).

=====
Darren Bane

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