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Diffstat (limited to 'docs/language.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | docs/language.txt | 24 |
1 files changed, 24 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/docs/language.txt b/docs/language.txt new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..06639f73bacc --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/language.txt @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +LANGUAGE.DOC + +The Language object handles all readable text produced by the +software. The most used function is getMessage(), usually +called with the wrapper function wfMsg() which calls that method +on the global language object. It just returns a piece of text +given a text key. It is recommended that you use each key only +once--bits of text in different contexts that happen to be +identical in English may not be in other languages, so it's +better to add new keys than to reuse them a lot. Likewise, +if there is text that gets combined with things like names and +titles, it is better to put markers like "$1" inside a piece +of text and use str_replace() than to compose such messages in +code, because their order may change in other languages too. + +While the system is running, there will be one global language +object, which will be a subtype of Language. The methods in +these objects will return the native text requested if available, +otherwise they fall back to sending English text (which is why +the LanguageEn object has no code at all--it just inherits the +English defaults of the Language base class). + +The names of the namespaces are also contained in the language +object, though the numbers are fixed. |