Re: KDE5-autostart bug
On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 07:54:33AM -0500, Cindy-Sue Causey wrote:
> Is it potentially anything related to language? I've wondered about
> that on occasion. Have admired the translation efforts going on. Are
> those percentage sign "field codes" universal for all languages?
Do you mean natural languages, or programming languages? The use of
"field codes" or "format specifications" that look like a percent sign
followed by a letter goes back at least to the printf() function in C.
The convention was widely adopted by other programming languages and
utility programs as well. In the shell alone, there's printf(1) and
date(1), and GNU's find(1) has a -printf extension that uses them.
If you're talking about natural language translations, then someone
translating a string that contains obvious programming-language syntax
like %s will have to take extra care to make sure the ordering of the
"field codes" is preserved. It's an important and difficult issue,
especially in natural languages that use a different syntax than English.
E.g. most romance languages place an adjective behind the noun that
it modifies ("el gato negro"), versus English which puts the adjective
in front ("the black cat"). If a program written in English specifies
a noun and an adjective using two "field codes" in the same string,
the translations have to preserve that ordering, because the code that
uses the string is going to pass the adjective first, and then the noun
second.
There are lots more issues of that nature -- many natural languages have
gendered nouns, and most idioms don't translate well, etc.
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