From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2012 06:46:20 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] i18n: Not add stripped contents for translation
Message-ID: <7v399mw7k3.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CANYiYbHGAG5ijeL3yW5SKYAfMNwtme5ELPeGNPhNyKBPGTONMg@mail.gmail.com>

Jiang Xin <worldhello.net@gmail.com> writes:

>> This is a tangent and I am just showing aloud my ignorance, but I wonder
>> if there is a reasonably generic and "best current practice" way to
>> structure code to show an enumeration in human languages, for example,
> ...
> I write a function for this.

It is not a very good API design to use static array in a function
like your code.

You will often want to walk list of lists in a nested loop and want
to have two "appends" running in parallel.  Imagine you are merging
three branches A, B and C in an octopus merge, and want to say
"commits A1 and A2 were merged from A".  You would want to structure
the caller like this:

        clear_list(&list_of_branches);
        # this walks branches A, B and C
        foreach branch
                append_item(&list_of_branches, branch);

                clear_list(&list_of_commits);
                # this walks commits on the branch
                foreach commit on branch
                        append_item(&list_of_commits, commit);
                # this shows e.g. "commits A1 and A2"
                format_list_as_human_string(&list_of_commits);
        # this shows e.g. "branches A, B and C"
        format_list_as_human_string(&list_of_branches);

In any case, I was not asking anybody to come up with an original
solution. Rather, I was asking if somebody knew an already widely
used library-ish implementation we can just reuse.  If there is no
such thing, we may end up designing one ourselves, but we shouldn't
be doing so if we don't have to.