[PD] What about multilingual Pd ?

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, Piotr Majdak wrote:

> Max Neupert wrote:
> > I kind of agree. but on the other hand it really sucks to make non  english
> > tutorials/workshops since the comments don't accept other  than english
> > chars.
> Yes, it's very difficult to explain new pd-users why the character set of my
> Commodore 64 was bigger than in pd ;-)

The charset of APL was bigger than the one of almost all programming 
languages, and I tell you, it was APL that people were complaining about!

(However, it was because so many glyphs were given special purposes
already, and was eating up the upper half of the 8-bit range, while almost
none of them had to do with locali[sz]ation)

> I think this part of pd is very, very out-of-date and pd should support
> blanks, backslashes, (please!) escape codes and other chars than
> english.

Agreed. It's part of my big plan, but it seems that I never have enough
energy to devote to the cause. It's a hard thing to do and one important 
step is to switch from the current communication system called "sys_vgui", 
to a more high-level and assisted mechanism which knows personally about 
PureData types and Tcl syntax and how to translate that. (Tcl is a 
language used by the user interface in Pd)

> I know that this issue was very often discussed here and I know there is
> a solution for that. Could a developer comment this? Should we vote for
> that?

A voting system has been alluded to on pd-dev in light of recent issues,
but has not been implemented, nor even adequately discussed. I don't think
that the restrictions to \{} will be resolved pd-wide, except in
DesireData, because the fix will cover too much source area, which will
fuel complaints by the merge-managers in case Miller doesn't think the fix
is to his taste but doesn't want to produce a fix that suits him (that
scenario isn't far-fetched and is the current everyday reality of Pd).

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada