"I can quit smoking whenever I want to."

"...I just don't want to."

Have you heard that one before? I heard something similar last week from a director of engineering:

"All of our strings are embedded in source code. This is deliberate, and we planned it very carefully."

How would you have reacted?

At first, I figured he was pulling my leg ("taking the mickey," "having me on," etc.). Then he explained the process of localizing strings in the gnu gettext model, which can live peacefully without external resources.

A line of code reading

result = wx.MessageDialog(_("Welcome to my blog. Today is %s"), date.today)

uses the _ function in the English context as an identity function. In a localized context it will load the language pack built using the gnu gettext utilities and map the English strings to the localized equivalent:

"Welcome to my blog. Today is %s" -> "Bienvenido a mi blog. Hoy es %s"

To redeem what seems like shortsightedness in allowing developers to embed strings in code, these utilities also contain scripts that can pull out all the English strings from source code and make localization packages, which translators can work on without danger of touching the code. Other scripts can push the localized strings back into place.

Like .properties files in Java and .rc files in C++, these localization packages isolate non-code elements for easy localization. However, a programmer's coding mistake could still result in strings going undetected by the scripts, so I still plan to perform pseudo-translation and internationalization testing on this software as soon as possible.

Just in case the director of engineering can't quit smoking as easily as he thinks he can.