If proposal https://github.com/golang/go/issues/37292 fails, everyone will lose out on a great opportunity. API's can be greatly simplified. Writing pre-processors and GO generate don't completely meet our truly meeting our needs. Is the extra implementation work worth the effort? Do we live with mediocre solutions to avoid repetition? Why do we live with mediocre solutions because we don't have compile time logic? Please consider "like" of this proposal otherwise we will miss this great opportunity.
There are many examples where compile time flexibility is important. Consider the adverse effect of GO limitations has had on the very important GNU GETTEXT( ) - native language support (multi-lingual messages and localization): - Documentation is 17 chapters -> https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html - Big-o complexity o(n^2)!!! - It has several important utilities for maintaining translation catalogs. - Hundreds of developer's were involved in its design and Implementation. They came up with the best implementation considering they don't have a compile time language. - Use and maintenance is labor intensive and time consuming . fmt.Println( gettext( fmt.Sprintf("message text at %v with %v bytes", time. format( ), number) ) ) When to implement Gettext( ) is a difficult decision and lots of work early in your project. As you can see, gettext( ) is a function call with the message to be translated. The message must contain everything to be translated. After determining the language and localization, gettext searches for a matching message translation rule in the language specific catalog. The rule is applied to the message and data needing localization is converted (e.g. dates, numbers, currency). fmt.Println( #gettext( "message text at %t with %n bytes", time, number ) ) or fmt.Println( #gettext( msgid="jon001", time, number )) Isn't this cleaner and easier to code. Just as important, the big-o complexity goes to o(n)!!! We could make this even easier by creating a #gettext.println( ) You won't see the #gettext() function unless you are the maintainer of this functionality. Function #gettext( ) is small and easy to maintain. One possible implementation for #gettext( ) with this proposal gives you lots of flexibility and eliminates 90% of the code in the real GNU gettext( ). func #gettext( args Args ) { src := "gettext(" // call real gettext function current_positional_arg := 1 if args.msgid != nil { // keyword argument "msgid" not specified src += args.msgid + " ,nil" } else { src += "nil, " + args.positional[1] current_positional_arg := 2 } for ; current_positional_arg <= args.positional.length; current_positional_arg { arg = args.positional[current_positional_arg] if reflect.TypeOf(arg) == "time.Time" { src += ",gettext.TimeLocal(" + arg + ")" } else if reflect.TypeOf(arg) == "int" { src += ",gettext.Number(" + arg + ")" } else { src += "," + arg } } compiler.AddStatement(*,src) // replaces the #gettext( ) with real code } This compiler called function replaces the #gettext( ... ) as follows: #gettext(msgid="jon001", number, time) would be replaced with gettext("jon001", nil, gettext.Number(number), gettext.TimeLocal(time) ) The new gettext( ) is greatly simplified. Messages are now in a easily accessible GO module. There arel language specific message modules that are dynamically loaded as needed. E.g. en_jon.go where en is an English message module and jon is the first part of the message id (e.g. jon001). Gettext( ) gets the message rule 001 from en_jon.go and applies the rule to the message. It's important that the language specific message modules are simple to edit by language translators. It also needs to be as similar as possible to the GNU standard while having GO syntax. #msg( language=en, prefix=jon ) // english messages jon### // translator-comments // extracted-comments // reference… // flag… #msg( id=001, // msg id jon001 msgstr[0]="message text at %t with %n bytes", ... msgstr[N]="message text at %t with %n bytes" ) // translator-comments // extracted-comments // reference… // flag… #msg( id=002, // message id jon002 msgstr[0]="message text at %t with %n bytes", ... msgstr[N]="message text at %t with %n bytes" ) // translator-comments // extracted-comments // reference… // flag… #msg( id=003, // message id jon003 msgstr[0]="message text at %t with %n bytes", ... msgstr[N]="message text at %t with %n bytes" ) Using the #msg( ) function hides the complexity of the real GO code to make this easy for translators to maintain. A compile time language has many more benefits that are not obvious. I strongly urge everyone to like proposal https://github.com/golang/go/issues/37292 . Thanks, Jon. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/2325901c-906e-4977-a989-5e0c00297052%40googlegroups.com.
