From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2003-06-06T09:55:37+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] A question on input encodings

On Thu, 5 Jun 2003 23:36:54 +0900, Dave Thomas wrote:
> I want to extend RDoc to support multiple human languages. One
> idea is to have flags in the comment blocks, such as
> 
> # This method...
> # :if: lang francaise
> # <french ...> 
> # :if: nihongo
> # <japanese ...> 
> # :if: german
> # <german...> 

I'm not sure that this is the best way to do it, personally. I'd
much rather see something at the beginning of the document:

# The following line specifies the default language.
# :lang: en
# The following line specifies that rdoc will find the external
# language as "filename.rb.fr".
# :external-lang: fr

By adding multiple languages *in* the document/program itself, you
lose a lot of the value of RDoc to begin with -- which is *program*
documentation so that I can read the documentation as I'm reading
the program.

Encoding options could be specified as:

# :external-lang: ja,SJIS
# :external-lang: fa,UTF8

This would fix the possibility of mixed encodings in a file.

-a, busy coding PDF::Writer, and hasn't really paid much attention lately
--
austin ziegler    * austin@halostatue.ca * Toronto, ON, Canada
software designer * pragmatic programmer * 2003.06.05
                                         * 20:47:51