Re: [Translation-i18n] Memory management in gettext?

[Alexander Dupuy]

Chris Scaife wrote:
> In my project I wanted to differentiate on negative values for
> ngettext and dngettext pluralization. Sadly they only work with
> unsigned long integers. Part of the problem is that on some systems
> this can be 32 bit and on others 64 bit. I'm hoping to suggest to the
> GNU gettext team that we could use signed values instead. For the time
> being, I've wrapped my pluralizing numbers that are above 10000 into
> the space 10000 - 19999... and then negative values can be discovered
> by testing > 20000 in the .po pluralization formula. It's not an
> elegant solution so if anyone has alternative suggestions I would love
> to hear :)

Another possibility would be that rather than mapping numbers into a 
particular range (yours is probably fine but one never knows) you could 
have your function make two separate calls to [d]ngettext, with 
different message contexts (negative numbers would have " (negative 
values)" appended to the default context or something like that).

This is a little inelegant for the translators, in that the .po file 
will contain the same message twice (with different contexts) but at 
least it will be very explicit what is going on, and in any language 
where a negative value requires different translation, it will be quite 
clear to the translator what needs to be done.

@alex

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