Hi Ludo, Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> writes:
> With (ice-9 format), as has been suggested before, we should be able to > do away with the “argument jumping” syntax (info "(guile) Formatted > Output"): > > (format #f "~1@*~d Zeichen lang ist die Zeichenkette `~0@*~a'" "ab" 2) > > It’s a bit awkward though, in particular because we have to jump to the > previous argument (0 and 1 here instead of 1 and 2). I wouldn't think of absolute goto directive jumping to the previous argument, it's just another chapter of the eternal debate regarding the first ordinal: Common Lisp/SLIB/ice-9 use the '0' convention for the 'first' position---the smallest element from the set of natural numbers---, instead of '1'. C-style arrays can be interpreted like this too. > Does xgettext support that syntax? We’ve had troubles before with ~*. These troubles are related to plural forms[1]. Singular forms don't have any issue because the type and number of format specifiers must match always. > If it does, where should we use this syntax in lieu of the simpler > forms? Everywhere? Yup, for singular forms (non-ngettext) it can be used everywhere right now. The translation of plural forms could, at most, omit one numeric directive (the one used for the ngettext call) to allow a more natural way of expressing implicitly the numeral, but this will need to wait for the next release of GNU gettext---the patch is almost there[2]. Nonetheless, the current version of msgfmt works correctly when no format directive is omitted. Happy hacking! Miguel [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gettext/2020-11/msg00027.html [2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gettext/2020-12/msg00041.html
