Internationalizations

Almost every computer software application communicates somehow with the user or support person in terms of human-readable text messages. When you start developing an application, you may be tempted to use the easiest form, for example using puts (or some other command) command with the message in your native language. It may work pretty well in the case of small, one-evening applications, but when it comes to mature-level software that is going to be presented to the world, you will soon search for an easy way to make your application speak in different languages.

Encoding issues

Internally, Tcl uses Unicode to store any string data in memory. We assume the reader is familiar with Unicode and UTF-8 terms, and describing it is beyond the scope of this book. For more information, you can visit http://www.unicode.org or simply search the network for interesting articles, because the topic is widely covered.

As UTF-8 encoding solves most of the problems with internationalization...