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Copyright 2009 Kevin Ryde

This file is part of Time-Duration-Locale.

Time-Duration-Locale is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at
your option) any later version.

Time-Duration-Locale is distributed in the hope that it will be
useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with Time-Duration-Locale.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.



Time::Duration::Locale offers versions of the Time::Duration functions
which automatically dispatch to one of the language-specific
sub-modules like Time::Duration::ja according to the user's locale and
language preferences, and when available.

This is an easy way to localize your prints, though you might wonder
if the amount of code here to achieve it could be slightly excessive.

The operative part is choosing a language from LANG, LANGUAGE etc.  An
explicit language setting too seemed like a good idea.  And then
instead of a single global variable for the language module it seemed
like a good idea to use an object, so you could in theory operate in
multiple language contexts.  Then some AUTOLOAD/can tricks allow
future functions to pass-through too.  Maybe some of that
function-to-method or method-to-function dispatch could be split out
for general use, though mixing styles like that probably shouldn't be
encouraged.

Incidentally in a language with declensions you might want a different
nominative/accusative/ablative etc according to what you're printing.
That's not addressed by the Time::Duration modules.  A single form may
at least be better than nothing.  Whole-message translations are of
course the sort of thing Locale::TextDomain etc does, though it only
supports variations on a single number like "2 hours", not multiple
numbers like "X hour(s) Y minute(s)", so you'd likely still end up
with some assumptions about how components should be joined up.

The key prerequisites for Time::Duration::Locale are

    * Time::Duration itself
    * Module::Load
    * Class::Singleton

The Time-Duration-Locale home page is

    http://user42.tuxfamily.org/time-duration-locale/index.html