Re: Invalid Operating System

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From: Jarkko Hietaniemi
Subject: Re: Invalid Operating System
Date: 01:09 on 16 Dec 2006
David Landgren wrote:
> Martin Ebourne did write:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> While I can understand the problem for non-native english speakers it's 
>> an endemic problem to any software at that level (as opposed to the UI 
>> level). I am not aware of any language that's translated in this way 
>> (although there's bound to be at least one, please correct me).
> 
> Excel macros spring to mind, at least for some late 90s version. SUM() 
> became SOMME() in French Excel, and the most hateful thing about it was 

...and AVERAGE() became KESKIARVO() in Finnish Excel.  Oh, the pain.

> the fucktards who coded the thing didn't even abstract the linguistic 
> label away from the underlying op, which meant that an US Excel macro 
> wouldn't run on a French Excel program.

Yeah, baby, yeah.  Let's do l10n and i18n by search-and-replace!

Another Excel-hate: "smart input" -- if I enter

12/10

it *ass*umes that I meant December tenth.  It could assume other
things, like a rational number 6/5, or a string "12/10", but of
course it lives in the world of bean counters and sales projections
and therefore it assumes (hateful) US date.

> It does work these days as expected, and the above recollections all a 
> bit hazy now (thank heavens for small mercies) so I no doubt have the 
> details a bit mixed up, but I do remember pain.
> 
> David

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