Make RFC on internationalising racket2

[spdegabrielle]

Like string-constants-lib String constants support internationalisation via translation files so DrRacket UI can be used in a range of languages, but applied to the code. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages

[spdegabrielle]

Of course this makes the DrRacket "Determine language from source" weird.

[sorawee]

I mean, the grammar of Racket is really:

#lang <id>
<whatever>

Is #lang and <id> supposed to be i18n-able?

[spdegabrielle]

@sorawee yes and also right to left like Arabic

لغة مضرب# (Just a guess

[gus-massa]

#lang is very difficult to internationalize, but you can use #! instead.

[spdegabrielle]

@gus-massa what makes it difficult?

[jeapostrophe]

I think that two productive things in this realm would be (1) integrating a notion of language into Scribble and (2) moving from exceptions that just strings to a huge number of Java-style exceptions with all the fields. The best example of this second point is the contract system. It has a huge amount of interesting information embedded in the string representation of the error.

[jackfirth]

Related work: the javascript package cacache on npm has multiple localized APIs, with the documentation and the library's exported identifiers available in both English and Spanish. I would be very happy to see something similar in the Racket world.

[Nyanraltotlapun]

Changes to infrastructure must be made to support easy creation and integration of translations. Documentations, main site, etc.

Another place is tools, like raco for example.