4 ms·

Although that approach to string creation tends to fall apart quickly in non-English languages: adjectival agreement, plural rules etc.

• garganzol 9y ago
  No, no, it doesn't fall apart! Lisp is Turing-complete. You can do (in English): "David has %n% apple%(when (> n 1) "s")%." You can move that rule to function etc. You can tweak that for the language you use in an endless number of ways.
  • chii 9y ago
    so you're going to ask your translater to learn Lisp?
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • garganzol 9y ago
      A generic translator cannot realistically cope with Lisp. It has to be a translator + NLP guy working together in conjunction to bring a high quality localization for the given textual model.
    • kazinator 9y ago
      No; you just give an example about how to customize the suffix based on the number, but don't say that it is "programming" or "software development" or anything like that. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html "Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.