message-format-wg

It's not hard to make a case against gettext, despite its maturity and large ecosystem. IMHO pluralization is a prime example, with an API that only cleanly handles the English case, requires the developer to be aware of translation gotchas, and honnestly confusing documentation and format. Compare that to MessageFormat's pluralization example (https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/blob/main/s...) which is very easy to understand and fully in the translator's hands.

Oh, the language aspect gets a lot worse than that. They explicitly have a non-goal of "all grammatical features of all languages", but the "common" cases are hard enough. From https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/blob/main/s... : .local $hasCase = {$userName :ns:hasCase} .match $hasCase vocative {{Hello, {$userName :ns:person case=vocative}!}} accusative {{Please welcome {$userName :ns:person case=accusative}!}} * {{Hello!}} But if anyone can find a good compromise, it's the Unicode team.

English has just singular and plural: one car, two cars, three cars (and zero cars). Some languages have more variations. E.g. Czech, Slovene and Russian has 1, 2-4 and 5 as different cases. Personally I think the syntax is too brittle. It looks too much like TeX code and it has the lisp like deal with lines ending with too many } braces. I would separate it into two cases: simple strings with just simple interpolation and then a more fuller markup language, more like a simplified xml. There are more example code at https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/blob/main/d...