Notes on GCC's Native Language Support By and large, only diagnostic messages have been internationalized. Some work remains in other areas; for example, GCC does not yet allow non-ASCII letters in identifiers. Not all of GCC's diagnostic messages have been internationalized. Programs like `genattr' (in fact all gen* programs) are not internationalized, as their users are GCC maintainers who typically need to be able to read English anyway; internationalizing them would thus entail needless work for the human translators. Messages used for debugging, such as used in dumped tables, should also not be translated. The GCC library should not contain any messages that need internationalization, because it operates below the internationalization library. Unlike some other GNU programs, the GCC sources contain few instances of explicit translation calls like _("string"). Instead, the diagnostic printing routines automatically translate their arguments. For example, GCC source code should not contain calls like `error (_("unterminated comment"))'; it should contain calls like `error ("unterminated comment")' instead, as it is the `error' function's responsibility to translate the message before the user sees it. By convention, any function parameter in the GCC sources whose name ends in `msgid' is expected to be a message requiring translation. If the parameter name ends with `gmsgid', it is assumed to be a GCC diagnostics format string requiring translation, if it ends with `cmsgid', it is assumed to be a format string for `printf' family of functions, requiring a translation. For example, the `error' function's first parameter is named `gmsgid'. GCC's exgettext script uses this convention to determine which function parameter strings need to be translated. The exgettext script also assumes that any occurrence of `%eMSGID}' on a source line, where MSGID does not contain `%' or `}', corresponds to a message MSGID that requires translation; this is needed to identify diagnostics in GCC spec strings. The `G_(GMSGID)' macro defined in intl.h can be used to mark GCC diagnostics format strings as requiring translation, but other than that it is a no-op at runtime. If you modify source files, you'll need at least version 0.14.15 of the GNU gettext package to propagate the modifications to the translation tables. After having built and installed these gettext tools, you have to configure GCC with --enable-maintainer-mode to get the master catalog rebuilt. Copyright (C) 1998-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved.