1 Notes on GCC's Native Language Support 2 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. 6 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. 13 14 The GCC library should not contain any messages that need 15 internationalization, because it operates below the internationalization 16 library. 17 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. 25 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 41 no-op at runtime. 42 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 45 tables. 46 47 After having built and installed these gettext tools, you have to 48 configure GCC with --enable-maintainer-mode to get the master catalog 49 rebuilt. 50 51 53 Copyright (C) 1998-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 54 55 Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, 56 are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright 57 notice and this notice are preserved. 58
Indexes created Wed Jun 24 00:24:50 UTC 2026