[Ocaml-i18n] Re: [Caml-list] Camomile-0.5.0

[Benjamin Geer]

Yamagata Yoriyuki wrote:
> There is a tension between purely functional style and the style using
> implicit states.  I am not sure about which style is better.

I think having a default locale based on the environment isn't bad.  It 
keeps things simple for beginners who aren't ready to think about 
locales yet.  Being able to change the default at run time wouldn't be 
bad either, and might handle Richard's wish not to have to specify 
locales lots of times in his program.  However, I think it's important 
to be able to use several different locales simultaneously.  Sometimes 
the right locale depends not on who the user is, but on what they're 
doing.  I often have to work with multilingual data.  At the moment I'm 
working on a financial application (not in Caml) in which we're supposed 
to allow users to specify that they want dates displayed in a certain 
locale, and currencies displayed in a different locale.  A 
multi-threaded web application would also need to handle different 
locales at the same time.

An approach that would seem appealing to me would be if you could create 
a locale object for any locale you want, and from that object, get other 
reusable objects that do the real work (formatting dates, translating 
strings, etc.).  That might also be OK for Richard: when the process 
starts to handle an HTTP request, it could get the appropriate locale 
object, then from that get date formatters and so on, and use those over 
and over without ever having to specify the locale again.  If it's not 
multi-threaded, it could even keep them in global variables (although I 
know John Skaller wouldn't approve :) .

Ben