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Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
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From:
Hans Aberg <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 10 Jun 2001 20:27:48 +0200
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Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
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At 11:30 +0100 2001/06/10, Chris Rowley wrote:
>> In addition to merely stamp the language label on a string, I think
>> that possibly one may have to stack it, that is, if there is a quote of
>> French within English, then one can from within the French quote know that
>> it is within an English quote.
>
>Frank's new LaTeX language model supports something quite
>sophisticated in this direction but this is for structured documents.

It is a tricky question -- the suggestion is to move it (the language
markup) to a more fundamental level, so it is always present. Then see what
happens -- of it is unworkable or not.

>It is not clear that information about the hierarchy makes sense
>when attached to an arbitrary text string since that may well get
>removed from its plqace in the hierarchy.

Quite on the contrary, when moving strings around, it easier to have the
language hierarchy already present:

Suppose you have an upper level French quote from some text, with other
languages nested within, and you want to insert it into an English text.
Then you simply move it in, with all hierarchical language levels: Think of
a markup say <french| ... |french> moved somewhere into the <english| ...
|english> quote.

When you select a sub-quote from an already language markupped text, it
merely gets the language labels it already has.

In effect, one is copying trees instead of lists.

>We have two _different_ things here, both naturally called language
>labels, whose values are closely related).

I am not sure what you mean here: It is necessary to treat human language
dialects of the same language (like US and UK English) as different
"abstract languages" in the computer, because they will for example make
use of different dictionaries for spell checking.

If one wants to be able to treat such different dialects as the same (i.e.,
like only "English" in the example), one can do that by adding another
variable to the bundle of variables that controls the language behavior.

The issue is complicated, but I think this is close to the model used on
computers that admit language localizations (like MacOS X).

  Hans Aberg

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