Professor Toal started by saying this is a practical talk and you will see concrete examples of internationalized code (I18n). He will try to present examples of everything that needs localization and show how this is done. He will not talk about writing systems, marketing software in multiple countries, upgrading existing non-globalized software, existing products and language packs, etc.

He started out with an example of greeter Java code with "Good Morning" and "Good Evening" hard coded into print statements. This is wrong, a resource bundle that contains a string should be obtained and printed out so the statements can be Internationalized. The strings are changed for each specific region to provide Localization (L10n). Examples were provided for English, Spanish and a greeting in an English dialect for Australia (G'day). Russian text had to be entered in code because the Russian text can't be entered directly as a Java property. Globalization (G11n) is Internationalization + Localization.

A locale is a geographic or political region or community that shares the same language, customs, or cultural conventions. There are three parts to a locale, Language + Country + Variant. Professor Toal provided examples of locales that were available on his laptop. If the requested locale is missing the defaults and a systematic search order are used to find the proper bundle. You can also get the locale from the command line at run time which is a good idea. Resource files are used as inputs to keep text out of the source code. If text was in the code human translators who are usually not programmers would have to mess with the source code. Expert programmers are used to using input files in this manner anyway and they appreciate keeping long text strings out of the source code. You can put more than text into a resource file (images, sounds, etc. are good candidates) but then you have to write code. Languages are defined in ISO 639 and Countries are defined in ISO 3166.

There are many linguistic and cultural issues to deal with: What characters are letters, numbers, symbols?, Ret there word breaks? Line breaks? How to use punctuation? In what direction is text written? How, exactly do you sort? (Uppercase/lowercase? Diatrics? Letter Combinations?) Which calendar is being used? What is the first day of the week? Are there months? How many? What's the deal with time zones? Is Daylight Savings Time in use? How do we write dates? Currencies? Numbers? Percentages? How are colors (culturally) interpreted? (E.g. white represents mourning or death in Eastern cultures, but western cultures use black. Red is purity in India, but danger in the U.S.) An image or icon in acceptable to one culture might be offensive to another. How does one "input" data from character sets with tens of thousands of characters? A big keyboard? In message formatting use whole messages, not pieces of messages, to deal with differences in word order. In number formatting there are different radix separators, thousands separators, position of negative sign (if indeed there is a symbol for it), position of currency symbols, etc. In date formatting there are different radix separators, thousands separators, position of negative sign, position of currency symbols, percentage symbols, etc. In searching and sorting of strings different languages have different rules. CH and LL are single letters in traditional Spanish. Different languages put the same marked characters in different places.

Then there are Character Sets. A Character is an abstract symbol like Plus Sign or Latin Capital Letter A or Musical Flat Sign. A coded character set or Codeset equals Repertoire plus mapping from positive integers to characters. The Codepoint of a character in a codeset is thenumber associated with it. A Glyph is a picture of a character. The Angstrom Sign and Latin Capital Letter A With Ring Above are different characters but have the same Glyph. Examples of character sets are Unicode, UCS, ASCII and ISO8859-x (x in 0..15). There are a number of Character Encoding Schemes. Data is stored and transmitted in bytes (bits, octets, whatever)

Everyone knows that numbers are encoded in bytes (one's complement, two's complement, IEEE-754 single, IEEE-754 double, etc.) How are characters encoded? Lots of ways: Direct encoding (for small codesets), UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 and many others. UTF-8 has many advantages as ASCII text is unchanged in it. Non-ASCII characters are never coded with ASCII characters and there are many other advantages of UTF-8.

Professor Toal provided a number of examples including Perl and XML. XML uses Unicode natively and an XML document is nothing but Unicode characters. You can specify a character encoding in the XML declaration. He summarized with Internationalization (I18n) is important, it often makes your code clearer and is pretty easy. Lots of things should be localized.

You can find the charts for this talk at:
http://www.technocage.com/~ray/talks/i18n.html

These charts include the examples not provided in this DATA-LINK report. And, of course, without attending our meeting you don't get the benefit of Professor Toal's excellent presentation or the opportunity to ask questions and get answers.

This was the seventh meeting of the LA Chapter year and was attended by 17 persons.
Mike Walsh, LA ACM Secretary