Internationalization in Cincom Visualworks - Les Kooyman

7/28/2019 Internationalization in Cincom Visualworks - Les Kooyman

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World Headquarters

Cincinnati, Ohio

Internationalization in

Cincom® VisualWorks®

Smalltalk Industry Conference

June 2013

Wigwam Resort

Phoenix, Arizona



Internationalization in Cincom

VisualWorksLes Kooyman

Smalltalk Engineering



Cincom Smalltalk Products



What do we mean by Internationalization?

•

Input and output in language-appropriate character set(may be quite complex – IME, BIDI, text shaping)

• Regionally-appropriate format customizations

(numbers, dates, times, currency amounts)

• Message translations (system and application)

implemented via message catalogs



A Story in two parts…

1.) Industry history

2.) VisualWorks (and ObjectStudio)history and trends



Part 1. Industry History

The Long and Winding Road…

Disclaimer: Please note that this is a selected history of our industry. Almostcertainly some achievements are not noted here due to time and space

limitations. This should in no way be construed to minimize the importance of

any other work related to this subject but not represented here.



First there were Morse and Baudot…

…Herman Hollerith, the 1890 Census

and C-T-R (->IBM)…

…ASCII and variants (ISO)… …EBCDIC…

…and then…



Blame it on 漢字 (Kanji) …

(Also Hiragana and Katakana)

JIS C 6220 (JIS C 0201): 1969

JIS X 0208-1990: Current*

IBM NLS: 1984

Unicode: 1991

*JIS X 0212-1990 specified but little used



National Language Support

(NLS)• NLS: Work to allow MVS to handle Kanji using

DBCS (double byte character set)

• Double Byte Technical Coordination Office

presents NLS implementation proposal to IBM

management, May 1984

• Followed by „Corporate Instruction #145, National

Language Support‟, a fundamental IBM policy



Blame it on 漢字 (continued…)

• Unicode: 1991

• ICU (ICU4J, ICU4C, etc.): 1999

• CLDR: 2003



Unicode

•

A project of the Unicode Consortium• Intended to allow all characters of all

scripts to be represented

• Versioned and released like software

• Characters represented by Codepoints

• Conceptually separate from its encodings

(UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.)

• VisualWorks now uses Unicode internally

for many operating system interfaces



International Components for Unicode

(ICU)

• Based on work by Taligent 1992-1995

• 1997: Became base for JDK 1.1 international APIs

• 1999: Initial open source release as “IBM Classes

for Unicode”

• Includes CLDR Locales

• ICU4J: ICU for Java

• ICU4C: ICU for C/C++



CLDR: Common Locale Data Repository

•

A project of the Unicode Consortium• Distributed as a set of XML files

• Versioned and released like software

•

XML dialect: LDML (Locale Data Markup Language)• Most people will use CLDR indirectly through

incorporation in development environments such as

ICU or VisualWorks



Part 2. VisualWorks and ObjectStudio

History and Trends



Internationalization Concerns

• Locale-based customizations

• Message catalogs

• Text composition & display



Locale-based customizations

• Time formatting

• Date formatting

• Number formatting

• Currency formatting

• Default measurement system (US, metric)

• Default paper size (US letter, A4)

• Collation

• System & User Messages via Message Catalogs



Examples of Locale names

language_TERRITORY.encoding

•en_US.Windows-1252

•en_US.UTF8



CLDR-based Locales in VisualWorks:

• Coexist in the image with Legacy Locales; the

programmer may choose either to be the activelocale system, but not both concurrently.

• Locale

• CompositeLocale

• LocaleLocalizationComponent

• LocaleEncodingComponent

• Smalltalk code generated from the CLDR

• Formatting may contain non-Roman characters

and/or right-to-left word ordering



Proliferation of Locales in VisualWorks

• 5i.4 (2001): 2 Locales

• 7.6 (2008): 15 Locales (“Legacy Locales”)

• 7.7 (2009): 417 Locales (CLDR-based Locales)

• 7.10 (2013): 587 Locales

• 8.0 (?): Legacy Locales removed to loadable parcel

• ?: On-Demand Locale construction (“JIT”)

• ?: Locales from “arbitrary” language/territory combos



Message catalogs

• Allow translation of messages and parameter

substitution

• Message catalogs searched by Locale

• Each process can have its own catalogs based on

its own Locale



Text composition & display

•

Capabilities vary widely by OS• Bi-directional text, text shaping not yet common

• Cross-platform solutions remain elusive

•

Text2 an exploration of these issues inVisualWorks, including BIDI



More support for I18N

• I18N Package

• Internationalizer

• New text editor (“Text2”)

• Per-process locales

• Locale-specific message catalogs

• Optional Byte Order Mark support

• ISO-8601 unambiguous timestamp formatting andreading for data exchange (future release)



Demonstration video: Internationalizer



Live demo: Text2



ObjectStudio 8

(2007) was the first

release built on the

VisualWorks class

library, thus using

the same Locales



Sources

• A Brief History of Character Codes in North America,Europe and East Asia; Steven J. Searle;http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html

• IBM History of Far Eastern Languages in Computing; KurtHensch; IBM Corporation, 2004

•

State of Text Rendering; Behdad Esfahbod; 2012;http://behdad.org/text

• Unicode Explained ; Jukka K. Korpela; O’Reilly; 2006

• CJKV Information Processing; Ken Lunde; O’Reilly; 2009

• http:// www.unicode.org

• http://cldr.unicode.org

• http://www.icu-project.org

http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html

http://behdad.org/text

http://www.unicode.org/

http://cldr.unicode.org/

http://www.icu-project.org/




http://cldr.unicode.org/

http://www.unicode.org/

http://behdad.org/text






Questions?



Thank you for attending!

Internationalization in Cincom Visualworks - Les Kooyman

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