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Pluralising messages or choosing word alternatives

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Tim Mackinnon

Pluralising messages or choosing word alternatives

I was browsing some of the Pharo issues (always worth doing) - and noticed an interesting one about Test results reporting and pluralisation
(https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/2578)

In it, I hadn't noticed String>>asPluralBasedOn: before (and judging from many messages in the image, many others hadn't either).

I'm fixing something similar for a refactoring bug and can use this technique there (although from memory, it comes with a health warning as if ever we want to internalise the messages in Pharo, this will need a different approach). However we are probably a distance from doing that - so cleaning up what we have is a good start.

Anyway I was curious if there is something to help with messages like:

‘There is 1 occurrence of {1}’ vs ‘There are many occurrences of {1}’, which I’d like to write something like:

‘There ‘, (‘is 1 ’, ‘are many ’) pick: result size, ‘occurrence’ asPluralBasedOn: result size, ‘ ‘, result printString.

Tim

gcotelli

Re: Pluralising messages or choosing word alternatives

Maybe you can use the conditional syntax of expandMacros.

On Wed, Feb 20, 2019, 18:08 Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:

I was browsing some of the Pharo issues (always worth doing) - and noticed an interesting one about Test results reporting and pluralisation
(https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/2578)

In it, I hadn't noticed String>>asPluralBasedOn: before (and judging from many messages in the image, many others hadn't either).

I'm fixing something similar for a refactoring bug and can use this technique there (although from memory, it comes with a health warning as if ever we want to internalise the messages in Pharo, this will need a different approach). However we are probably a distance from doing that - so cleaning up what we have is a good start.

Anyway I was curious if there is something to help with messages like:

‘There is 1 occurrence of {1}’ vs ‘There are many occurrences of {1}’, which I’d like to write something like:

‘There ‘, (‘is 1 ’, ‘are many ’) pick: result size, ‘occurrence’ asPluralBasedOn: result size, ‘ ‘, result printString.

Tim

Esteban A. Maringolo

Re: Pluralising messages or choosing word alternatives

In reply to this post by Tim Mackinnon

Why not use the condition macro so you have a single string literal, that in the future could be used for translation?

E.g.

| occurences |

occurences := 3.

'There <1?is:are> <2p> <1?occurrence:ocurrences> of <3p>' expandMacrosWith: occurences = 1 with: 3 with: 'Foo'

Esteban A. Maringolo

El mié., 20 feb. 2019 a las 18:08, Tim Mackinnon (<[hidden email]>) escribió:

I was browsing some of the Pharo issues (always worth doing) - and noticed an interesting one about Test results reporting and pluralisation
(https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/2578)

In it, I hadn't noticed String>>asPluralBasedOn: before (and judging from many messages in the image, many others hadn't either).

I'm fixing something similar for a refactoring bug and can use this technique there (although from memory, it comes with a health warning as if ever we want to internalise the messages in Pharo, this will need a different approach). However we are probably a distance from doing that - so cleaning up what we have is a good start.

Anyway I was curious if there is something to help with messages like:

‘There is 1 occurrence of {1}’ vs ‘There are many occurrences of {1}’, which I’d like to write something like:

‘There ‘, (‘is 1 ’, ‘are many ’) pick: result size, ‘occurrence’ asPluralBasedOn: result size, ‘ ‘, result printString.

Tim

Sven Van Caekenberghe-2

Re: Pluralising messages or choosing word alternatives

In reply to this post by Tim Mackinnon

You should have a look at what Seaside has.

Like Integer>>#pluralize:with:

But also the class GRInflector that understand more about English than I do ;-)

> On 20 Feb 2019, at 22:07, Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I was browsing some of the Pharo issues (always worth doing) - and noticed an interesting one about Test results reporting and pluralisation
> (https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/2578)
>
> In it, I hadn't noticed String>>asPluralBasedOn: before (and judging from many messages in the image, many others hadn't either).
>
> I'm fixing something similar for a refactoring bug and can use this technique there (although from memory, it comes with a health warning as if ever we want to internalise the messages in Pharo, this will need a different approach). However we are probably a distance from doing that - so cleaning up what we have is a good start.
>
> Anyway I was curious if there is something to help with messages like:
>
> ‘There is 1 occurrence of {1}’ vs ‘There are many occurrences of {1}’, which I’d like to write something like:
>
> ‘There ‘, (‘is 1 ’, ‘are many ’) pick: result size, ‘occurrence’ asPluralBasedOn: result size, ‘ ‘, result printString.
>
>
> Tim
>
>

Tim Mackinnon

Re: Pluralising messages or choosing word alternatives

In reply to this post by Esteban A. Maringolo

Some great suggestions here guys - I had forgotten there were conditionals in expandMacros… that is the better solution.

Although I do kind of think that something on OrderedCollection like:

chooseBasedOn: count

^self at: ((count max: 1) min: self size)

Would be a nice general solution for other things (I’m kind of suprised there isn’t something like that there)

On 20 Feb 2019, at 21:21, Esteban Maringolo <[hidden email]> wrote:

Why not use the condition macro so you have a single string literal, that in the future could be used for translation?

E.g.
| occurences |
occurences := 3.
'There <1?is:are> <2p> <1?occurrence:ocurrences> of <3p>' expandMacrosWith: occurences = 1 with: 3 with: 'Foo'

Esteban A. Maringolo

El mié., 20 feb. 2019 a las 18:08, Tim Mackinnon (<[hidden email]>) escribió:
I was browsing some of the Pharo issues (always worth doing) - and noticed an interesting one about Test results reporting and pluralisation
(https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/2578)

In it, I hadn't noticed String>>asPluralBasedOn: before (and judging from many messages in the image, many others hadn't either).

I'm fixing something similar for a refactoring bug and can use this technique there (although from memory, it comes with a health warning as if ever we want to internalise the messages in Pharo, this will need a different approach). However we are probably a distance from doing that - so cleaning up what we have is a good start.

Anyway I was curious if there is something to help with messages like:

‘There is 1 occurrence of {1}’ vs ‘There are many occurrences of {1}’, which I’d like to write something like:

‘There ‘, (‘is 1 ’, ‘are many ’) pick: result size, ‘occurrence’ asPluralBasedOn: result size, ‘ ‘, result printString.

Tim

Richard O'Keefe

Re: Pluralising messages or choosing word alternatives

In reply to this post by Tim Mackinnon

These days we are supposed to think about

internationalisation and localisation.

The rather elderly and inadequate

'<1P> foobar<2?:s>' expandMacrosWith: n with: n = 1

works fine for English, but when you switch to

'<1P> foobar<2?:s>' translated

  expandMacrosWith: n with: n = 1

you run into the problem that there are

languages, such as Hebrew and Modern Standard

Arabic, with a dual number, so that you need

to distinguish 1, 2, >2 cases. Then there are

the oddball languages with a "paucal" number.

Generally it is better to rephrase the text,

'Number of foobars = <1P>' expandMacrosWith: n.

On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 at 10:08, Tim Mackinnon <[hidden email]> wrote:

I was browsing some of the Pharo issues (always worth doing) - and noticed an interesting one about Test results reporting and pluralisation
(https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/2578)

In it, I hadn't noticed String>>asPluralBasedOn: before (and judging from many messages in the image, many others hadn't either).

I'm fixing something similar for a refactoring bug and can use this technique there (although from memory, it comes with a health warning as if ever we want to internalise the messages in Pharo, this will need a different approach). However we are probably a distance from doing that - so cleaning up what we have is a good start.

Anyway I was curious if there is something to help with messages like:

‘There is 1 occurrence of {1}’ vs ‘There are many occurrences of {1}’, which I’d like to write something like:

‘There ‘, (‘is 1 ’, ‘are many ’) pick: result size, ‘occurrence’ asPluralBasedOn: result size, ‘ ‘, result printString.

Tim