first indent your code and repost it :)

JustAStupidGurl

I think wasting space would be right at the bottom of my list of priorities. Much more important would be clarity, execution speed etc. If you really want to save space, write your source code using a smaller font.

JustAStupidGurl

Brilliant if documented by a comment that they must be primes. Otherwise Horror.

JustAStupidGurl

Is "Walla" Indian of French? :)

JustAStupidGurl

I remember some years ago calculating the baud rate of frisbee-ing a CD across the office. Of course now you can throw a stack of DVDs or a USB drive. What about a RAID array in the back of a Ferrari? Data on the Space Shuttle whizzing round in orbit? All the data-storage on earth going round the sun?

JustAStupidGurl

What do you think? But then I'm JustAStupidGirl, so you never know.

JustAStupidGurl

Hijri calendars is another whole rant on its own :) We've never managed to get something working with the OS built-in versions as it's not a straight fixed conversion from Gregorian. (Well actually it is, but the Saudis and others like to tinker with it depending on actual manual moon sightings etc.) For display and data entry purposes we have always ended up building our own conversion table that the user can tweak as required. The OS version can be used to generate the 'default' conversion, but there will always be some client who disagrees with it or wants to change it retrospectively. We've even had different departments in the same client company implementing different conversions.

JustAStupidGurl

:)

JustAStupidGurl

Go ahead

JustAStupidGurl

Forgot Malayalam . In Singapore and Malaysia, Malayalam is written with the Arabic script.

JustAStupidGurl

In Pakistan Punjabi is written with a version of the Arabic script known as Shahmukhi.

JustAStupidGurl

Pretty much what we do too on the corporate stuff as most Arab sys admins speak pretty good English. For the home user stuff we use NSIS. Our RTL customers are from most places. Gulf is a big market, but we are seeing Afghan stuff from the NGOs and US forces. A lot of RS232 driven add-on UIs for things like security systems, manufacturing machinery etc.

JustAStupidGurl

modified on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 10:48 AM

That sounds more like a marketing issue. There is HUGE demand for Arabic applications, particularly in the Gulf area. Most government and similar software mega-contracts simply use English because that's all that is available. Or try to write their own with disastrous results.[Click me] :) Anyone supplier with proper Arabic can run rings around the others.

JustAStupidGurl

It's not just me then :)

JustAStupidGurl

Modern Thai is left to right. But it's funny I've heard that a few times. Maybe because in the old MSDN packages Microsoft used to put Arabic, Hebrew and Thai on the same CD. What do you use for an Arabic installer? Or you just use English? NSIS has great Arbaic support, but other drawbacks. Check out Divelements. Their entire WPF suite is fully bi-directional - but they stand out as a shining exceptin in a world that does not seem to care.

JustAStupidGurl

Or make the input several MB. It could then produce every possible C# source code file, not to mention every possible poem of that size. Bound to be a few good ones :)

JustAStupidGurl

Have you noticed that when things are said to be localizable, it usually means localizable EXCEPT for right-to-left languages? Which is just great unless you are selling to the whole world. Joomla fully-supports right-to-left, but are any bidirectional templates available? No! Most commercial or free template designers get to the bit where they need to do the right-to-left bit and just leave a stub. Who needs it? Right? Most of my market is left-to-right speaking, so I just don't care. To heck with all those folks who slaved over the Joomla source to make it localizable. Same with Wix. It even has Arabic and Hebrew support files, but no right-to-left support (!?) Almost every component for .Net (with the exception of Sandbar). Almost every code, program or website authoring application or support tool you can think of. Right-to-left is just Arabic and Hebrew, right? Well no. There are Arabic, Azeri, Azerbaijani, Bakhtiari, Balochi, Farsi, Gilaki, Javanese, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Kurdish, Sorani, Malay, Malayalam, Pashto, Punjabi, Qashqai, Sindhi, Somali, Sulu, Takestani, Turkmen, Uighur, Western Cham Hebrew, Hebrew, Ladino, Judezmo, Yiddish, N'ko, Mandekan, Syriac, Assyrian, Modern Aramaic, Koine, Syriac, Thaana, Dhivehi, Maldivian, Tifinar, Tamashek, Urdu and I'll stop now, but those are just the common ones. Hey, but they all live in caves, right? So who cares. Anybody ever looked at that mysterious Flowdirection or RightToLeftLayout property? Remind me again, how long is it since somebody though of Unicode? And how come MSI (or Windows Installer as they like us to call it now) still uses code pages? At least now the French can have accents on letters in their software. I remember when people used to complain about that.

JustAStupidGurl

modified on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 10:08 AM

Was just asked to convert some VB6 code to C#. The purpose of the code is to find anagrams. There is a database with a list of words. The input is a string of letters and the code is supposed to spit out any matching anagrams found in the word list. The idea is to have a 'crossword puzzle' helper tool that can be downloaded from an ad-financed puzzle enthusiasts website, but the client felt it was too slow to use and wondered if C# might be faster. This is what I found: All possible orders of letters in the input string are derived in a loop, then each one is searched against the database to see if it exists. As you might imagine, with anything except a very short input this yields gazzilions of combinations and takes forever (almost literally) to run. The first thing I did was a run-once bit of code to sort the letters in each word in the database into alphabetical order, and stick that in as a key field. To find an anagram, the letters in the input are also sorted into alphabetical order. We then match that to the indexed key field and pull out matching words in the blink of an eye. The end result runs in milliseconds instead of centuries. Or as the client put it "That C#'s a bit faster than VB6, isn't it?" Should I now point out that a downloadable C# app is not a good idea? Their user base (presumably little old ladies) would need the net framework on their Win98 PCs, and having downloaded once, they don't need to go back to click on the knitting pattern banner ads. It should run in a browser. But what do I know? I'm just a stupid girl.

JustAStupidGurl

Has anyone figured out how to use Wix to generate proper localized MSI installs? It's not too hard for left-to-right languages, but for the various common right-to-left languages it seems impossible. Wix supposedly comes with Arabic and Hebrew localization files (for ver 2, but they are easily updated to ver 3.5 by adding three missing translations) but they just seem to plug Arabic or Hebrew text into the standard left-to-right dialogues, which looks weird and confusing. Imagine releasing an English product where the entire install UI dialogs were a complete mirror image, with English text plugged into them. Unthinkable, right? I've tried everything single thing I can think of, and have tested on various OS in various languages, but the UI remains stubbornly left-to-right. I know it's possible because there are Arabic MSI files out there from Microsoft that show a perfect right-to-left install UI (even on en-US operating systems). Wix can theoretically de-compile one of these back to source to show how it's done, but most of them are MASSIVE and would yield yards of code. (I've tried it, but it crashed out after about an hour.) It would be possible to "fake" right-to-left support by replacing EVERY dialog with a custom one (a huge boring job) where the Left attribute etc. was changed to reposition everything, but it would still be a kludge. Progress bar would still run the "wrong" way etc. I'm seriously thinking of changing to NSIS (which has AMAZING right-to-left support) but really that's only good for direct single-user installations. Too many network tools need an MSI to work properly. Any ideas?

JustAStupidGurl

Well I've tried to stay out of that. I think it's a mistake to become obsessive about 'programming rules' in cases where they are of marginal benefit. There is of course a difference between this (the two returns are pretty obvious) and yards of obscure code salted with multiple return statements.

JustAStupidGurl