Topic: Advice for sending Lisp routines from USA to China

[Rabbit]

I need to package up some lisp routines I've written for use in China.  Besides the obvious language differences, is there anything else that I should take into consideration?  Also, some of these routines reference external .xlsx and .txt files that are in different locations on our servers.  I want to give instructions of placing all the files in the same folder(s).  Is there a install program that will create the folder(s) where the user specifies?  And what is the best way to have the lisp routines to reference the external files?  The person on the other end does have good English skills.  Would it be better to give them detailed instructions on how to edit the lisp routine when they have absolutely no programming experience?  That person may need to go and and fix the prompts to display the correct language, and I don't speak or read their language.  Heck, I don't even know what their language is.  According to Wikipedia "The languages most studied and supported by the state include Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang. China has 292 living languages and 1 extinct language (Jurchen) according to Ethnologue."  Uhmmmmm.....yeeahhh.  I don't think I'll be doing that.

This is a first for me.  I've always written for use in a single office.  I've never sent anything to somewhere else.  All advice is welcome.

Sincerely,
Rabbit

[danallen]

I think screen shots of user interface assembled into an install PDF will help, even if the language icons are different, they'll get the intent

[T.Willey]

If you use command calls, make sure they are not language dependant.  I forget which one it is, but I think the underscore will allow all languages to call the same command.

(command "_list")
vs.
(command "list")

[CAB]

Have you considered a scheme like this for prompts?
It is a bit tricky but the UserPrompt.lsp could be all that he must modify to manage the prompts.
Just a thought.

Code: [Select]

;;  returns the prompt string
(defun UserPrompt (pmpt lang)
  ;;  lang 1 = English
  ;;       2 = Chinese (simplified)
  ;;       3 =
  (nth lang
       (assoc pmpt
              '((0 "Yes No" "? ?")
                (1 "Pick a point:" "??????:")
                (2 "Do you really want to do it? Yes/No: " "??????????? ?/ ?:")
               )))
)



(defun c:test()
    ;;  Return T / nil
  (cond ((setq ans (progn (initget 0 (UserPrompt 0 1))(getkword (strcat "\n" (UserPrompt 2 1)))))
                                (eq 0  (vl-string-search ans (UserPrompt 0 1))))
              (t)
              )
  )

[kruuger]

http://www.theswamp.org/index.php?topic=43368.0
k.