Re: More i18n

[Kevin Ryde]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
> In order to be consistent with the rest of `(ice-9 i18n)',
> `language-information' accepts an optional argument which should be a
> locale object.  Consequently, `language-information' has to perform
> appropriate charset conversion.

If you ask for something from a particular locale object, shouldn't
you get the charset of that object?  That'd be what I'd expect.

(Just for the time being of course, while encodings in strings are
exposed.)

> +#   iconv.h - SuS v2
> +#   iconv - X/Open, SuS v2

AM_ICONV (from gettext, see its manual) is good for that detection, it
can cope with various oddities.

> address@hidden
> +(language-information DAY_1 (make-locale LC_ALL_MASK "C"))
> address@hidden "Sunday"

DAY_1 smells a lot like C, surely something more schemely is possible?
After all, guile isn't a C interpreter with parenthesized syntax!  :-)

You should setup to use localeconv and strftime too, if nl_langinfo
isn't available, that'd cope with DOS systems.  Or if you want to tie
only to nl_langinfo then calling the function nl-langinfo will make it
clearest what's being had.

> +  scm_error (scm_system_error_key, func_name,
> +          "Failed to install locale",
> +          scm_cons (scm_strerror (s_err), SCM_EOL),
> +          scm_cons (s_err, SCM_EOL));

SCM_SYSERROR ?

> +  c_result = strdup (c_result);
> +  if (c_result == NULL)
> +    {
> +      result = SCM_BOOL_F;
> +      /* FIXME: Raise an error.  */

The frames stuff is the easiest way to cope with errors like out of
memory from within a mutex lock.

Though I suspect there's quite a few places in existing code that may
leak resources of one type or another under out of memory errors.  And
I doubt out of memory is even recoverable at all if genuinely almost
full.

> +#define SCM_DEFINE_LOCALE_CATEGORY(_name)                    \
> +  scm_c_define ("LC_" SCM_I18N_STRINGIFY (_name) "_MASK",    \
>               SCM_I_MAKINUM (LC_ ## _name ## _MASK));

scm_from_int (or long, as the case may be) can protect against the
unlikely case of a mask bit outside the size of a fixnum.

> +         nconv = iconv (cc, (char **)&str, &len,
> +                        &output, &output_avail);

Incidentally, if you're thinking about iconv (which I suspect is not
needed yet), then I've found it useful to also have conversions that
put in dummies for untranslatable chars.  With glibc the charset names
"foo//TRANSLIT" etc give that effect, but elsewhere you have to watch
for EILSEQ and skip that char.  Good for output to at least display
something.

>  (define priv:locale-abbr-weekday-vector
> -  (vector "Sun" "Mon" "Tue" "Wed" "Thu" "Fri" "Sat"))
> +  (cond-feature (language-information
> +                 (vector ABDAY_1 ABDAY_2 ABDAY_3
> +                         ABDAY_4 ABDAY_5 ABDAY_6 ABDAY_7))

This raises a point about the interface.  It should be possible to ask
for "day number N".  If ABDAY and friends aren't consecutive then they
should be.