I abhor this practice, frankly. It doesn't take that much more work to type gettext("The translating string"), or even t("string"). The purpose of "blank variab

I abhor this practice, frankly. It doesn't take that much more work to type gettext("The translating string"), or even t("string"). The purpose of "blank variable" is better served by _ than translations are. And gettext the tool can pull out the terms requiring translation using any identifier; you don't have to use "_", and I believe "gettext" is supported automatically. Also, depending on what you're doing, a simple function might not be enough; the _("foo") stuff was intended to simply use the locale of the local machine, which is almost certainly wrong in certain environments, such as server-side programming. (Where we need to bind in things like the user's preferences, or the Accept-Language header on the current request to the call to the translation function, so _("foo") is really something like _("foo", request), though with a bit of magic we can get back to a _("foo") syntax, though again, I prefer the explicitness of gettext("foo") or translate("foo").)