🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug2.111432.3917@nntp.hut.fi> jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala) writes:
>There's been some talk about what languages to use in UU.  As in many
>other fields, English (or perhaps "broken English ;-) seems to be the
>"lingua franca" of Usenet, and it seems like it will be the most used
>language also in UU.  But there's little reason not to use other
>languages also.  When using other languages, it probably would be a
>good idea to mark the name of the language on the Subject: line and/or
>Keywords field of the article.
>
>Ideally, we'd have multi-part messages supported by UU software with
>each in different language.  If no translation is currently available,
>the software will issue a request to translate it and a student of UU
>will translate the article to the desired langauge (or perhaps two
>students, going thru Esperanto or some other common language).
>
>//Jyrki

This is an interesting concept.
It raises interesting concepts as to the way that learning software will
need to be written.
For example, when having a piece of learning software that is
writen in, say, Turbo Pascal 6.0, instead of having text output to the
screen using, say,

writeln('Please enter the value of x');

we will have to use

writeln(prompttext[7]);

or whatever, where a declaration

prompttext: array [1..20] of string[79];

has been included in the program.

An early task of the program will be to look for a file language.use and
use the name of the language in that file as the name of the file from
which to read in the set of prompt lines.
If language.use contains the word ask then the user will be asked to enter
the name of the chosen language from the keyboard.

(Indeed, maybe it will be a bit more sophisticated and prepared to
ask the user what language to use, with the question in a preset
language, set up generally by the user, with protection so that if
the files are not there, then it will ask something anyway!)

If this is the approach that is used, then maybe we can gather together
a library of routines for organizing the reading in and manipulation
of prompts.

The user of the learning software may not even realize that it has been
written using Turbo Pascal, or whatever.