1 Notes on GCC's Native Language Support
3 By and large, only diagnostic messages have been internationalized.
4 Some work remains in other areas; for example, GCC does not yet allow
5 non-ASCII letters in identifiers.
7 Not all of GCC's diagnostic messages have been internationalized. Programs
8 like `genattr' (in fact all gen* programs) are not internationalized, as
9 their users are GCC maintainers who typically need to be able to read
10 English anyway; internationalizing them would thus entail needless work for
11 the human translators. Messages used for debugging, such as used in dumped
12 tables, should also not be translated.
14 The GCC library should not contain any messages that need
15 internationalization, because it operates below the internationalization
18 Unlike some other GNU programs, the GCC sources contain few instances
19 of explicit translation calls like _("string"). Instead, the
20 diagnostic printing routines automatically translate their arguments.
21 For example, GCC source code should not contain calls like `error
22 (_("unterminated comment"))'; it should contain calls like `error
23 ("unterminated comment")' instead, as it is the `error' function's
24 responsibility to translate the message before the user sees it.
26 By convention, any function parameter in the GCC sources whose name
27 ends in `msgid' is expected to be a message requiring translation.
28 If the parameter name ends with `gmsgid', it is assumed to be a GCC
29 diagnostics format string requiring translation, if it ends with
30 `cmsgid', it is assumed to be a format string for `printf' family
31 of functions, requiring a translation.
32 For example, the `error' function's first parameter is named `gmsgid'.
33 GCC's exgettext script uses this convention to determine which
34 function parameter strings need to be translated. The exgettext
35 script also assumes that any occurrence of `%eMSGID}' on a source
36 line, where MSGID does not contain `%' or `}', corresponds to a
37 message MSGID that requires translation; this is needed to identify
38 diagnostics in GCC spec strings.
39 The `G_(GMSGID)' macro defined in intl.h can be used to mark GCC diagnostics
40 format strings as requiring translation, but other than that it is a
43 If you modify source files, you'll need at least version 0.14.15 of the
44 GNU gettext package to propagate the modifications to the translation
47 After having built and installed these gettext tools, you have to
48 configure GCC with --enable-maintainer-mode to get the master catalog
52 Copyright (C) 1998-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
54 Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
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