Its only English centric if the idea is fixed to plurals, because its
only for plurals where English words are mutated by grammar rules.
In other languages, words are mutated by other factors, such as the
gender of the word, the case, and the number.
The problem can be quite difficult, say in Russian. Suppose you want to
say something like "Respected <customer name>" and interpolate <customer
name> from a database. In English, its a doddle. But in Russian, all
adjectives (eg. 'respected') have both male and female forms, so the
gender of customer has to be determined in order to correctly interpolate.
And for plurals, some languages have different words for single, double
and many forms. In
Russian, the noun after the number has one form for 1 (nominative
singular), another form (genitive singular) for numbers 2 to 4, and then
a third form (genitive plural) for 5 and above. So, a simple plural hook
is insufficient.
Then take Welsh, its words mutate with prefixes as well as suffixes
dependent on context.
Whilst it would be nice for there to be a neat syntax for such things
(thus avoiding English-centricity), the complexities of all languages
might be too burdensome for core perl6.
Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
On 26/01/2008, Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
After a recent exchange on PerlMonks about join, I've been thinking
about the problem of pluralization in interpolated strings, where we
get things like:
say "Received $m message{ 1==$m ?? '' !! 's' }."
...
Any other cute ideas?
No matter what you do it will remain too English-centric. It might
work for Catalan, too. But it will remain totally useless for Arabic
or Chinese.
In any case, i don't understand why should this be in the core language at all.
