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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: Fuzzy clock and half-past
From:       Logi Ragnarsson <logir () logi ! org>
Date:       2001-01-07 14:40:26
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Laugardaginn  6. janúar 2001 18:43 skrifaði Frerich Raabe:

Problem: in Icelandic we would use the second case (þolfall) for the date on 
which a letter was written, but dates are returned by the system in the  
first case (nefnifall). But the format of the date needs to be modifiable by 
the user. This can't ever work. In the end, to avoid looking like an idiot, I 
have to modify the date of a reference by hand each time I send an e[-]mail.

The only way I can see around this would be to have the dates available in a 
locale-specific number of cases and then them all to the string lookup 
routine, a bit like the hours below. It's quite a bit of work, though. Maybe 
have the routine which returns the formated date acutally return an array of 
all cases of the date, then pass the content of this array as %1, ..., %N and 
in Icelandic we would say "%2 skrifaði %0" to get the second case of the date 
and the name of the author.

Probably we'll have to write some ugly hack like "DATE, PERSON skrifaði" 
which noone would ever do in real life, but would mantain the grammatical 
consitency.

How does this work out for our German speaking friends or the poor Finns with 
their 16 cases?

But this wasn't what I was going to say at all. I justa lways get really 
annoyed when I see the kluge of a reference line.

> It actually does work, as %0, %1, %2 etc. are not only placeholders which
> define the hour-expression within the term but also which hour is
> referenced. %0 references the current hour, %-1 the previous, %1 the next
> etc.
>
> An example (assuming it's 11:45h):
> quarter to %0 becomes quarter to eleven
> quarter to %1 becomes quarter to twelve
> quarter to %-1 become quarter to ten
>
> This is neccessary for exactly the reason mentioned - different languages
> reference different hours. Unfortunately there seem to be many more special
> cases that I'd have expected (that's the reason Antonio added another list
> of hour names [tagged with "one" IIRC]), so I might drop that placeholder
> system completely and use a biiiig (static) list instead, although I'm not
> too happy with that solution.
>
> - Frerich

The fuzzy clock now works nicely and it's *great*! I keep looking at it and 
just smile. I love the way this hugely complicated machine with trillions of 
semiconductor interfaces, running tens of millions of lines of code sits 
there and says "Tuttuguogfimm mínútur yfir þrjú" as if it couldn't spit 
blinking colons and millisecond timers at me.

I think people will start worrying about me when I bring this back to work 
and keep smiling at my computer all the time. Perhaps I'll even get some 
vacation at last :)

Any hope of getting even fuzzier modes? "Winter" would do nicely. In 
Icelandic we could translate "Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer" to "Winter 
(wet), Winter (cold), Winter (windy), Spring & Autumn (windy & wet)".

Cheers,
Logi

This message was sponsored by the Icelandic Tourist Board.

-- 
Logi Ragnarsson - logir@logi.org
Some day we all shall be out of scope

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