Pete's Log: international what now?
Entry #1355, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 25 years old.)
I read a study the other day that found that people who were "forced" to grow up bilingual are more likely to have their brains stay "young" for longer. This is happy news for me, since I was forced to grow up more than bilingual.
So given my background of internationality, one would think I'd be more attuned to the woes of international software users. My first mac ran the German edition of Mac OS. Version 6.something, I think. You know, back when the System and the Finder had separate version numbers and the multifinder was HOT!
But I find myself having more difficulty than I should with international coding issues. Take our recent patch to netViz 7.0, for example. I thought I'd be clever and optimize a table lookup by converting it from a linear search to a binary search. I figured we'd save on average 30-some string comparisons per lookup, and it seemed like a safe change to me. Well, not really. We got a complaint from somebody in Slovakia yesterday that this particular table lookup was failing ever since he installed the patch.
Well, I figured out that the string comparison was failing. As it turns out, not all languages consider "alphabetical order" to be the same thing. So much for this being a safe change. So now looking back with more than a year of real-world experience, I think if I would have liked to have one thing covered a little better during my education, it would have been internationalization. Because even if you think you know how to do I18N, there are always a few more gotchas lurking out there.
I guess I better get back to work.