Re: [boost] Review of mustache starts today.

On 07.02.23 15:28, René Ferdinand Rivera Morell via Boost wrote:

On Tue, Feb 7, 2023 at 7:29 AM Rainer Deyke via Boost wrote:

...

Reservation 1: The plural problem ---------------------------------

One fundamental applications of a text templating language is to format a user-visible text string with values substituted in, like the following:

"Found %d files and %d directories."

[snip]

The way that I'm familiar with to solve such problems in general is to properly localize your strings. Localization is not just for language but for gender and plurality. And the usual way to do localization is to provide whole alternate strings for the messages. Which is something that would happen outside of the template itself. As it would mean reading from a database of alternate strings.

If you read my full post, you will see that I have explicitly addressed and rejected that option. The problem is that it doesn't scale. In the above example, I would need four possibilities for English: "Found %d files and %d directories." "Found 1 file and %d directories." "Found %d files and 1 directory." "Found 1 file and 1 directory." Each additional variable doubles the number of strings I need, so at eight variables I am up to 256 strings, at which point I would definitely write a script to generate the strings. And that's just for English. Arabic has a total of 6 forms I might use, so for 8 variables I need 1679616 different strings. I don't even want to keep that many strings in RAM, let alone write them by hand. -- Rainer Deyke (rainerd@eldwood.com)