[Development] Alternative plural forms for English (and similar)

[Jörg Bornemann]

On 5/1/26 1:37 PM, Oswald Buddenhagen via Development wrote:

>> Are there any other considerations that I should be aware of?
>>
> adding a special case for zero (or any other specific number) can always 
> be done at the application level. this inherently can't break anything. 
> it's just extra work, but overall much less work than if you impose that 
> extra case on all other instances that don't need it, or make the system 
> much more complex by supporting each edge case explicitly through some 
> overloads/configuration flags.
> 
> generally, the plural support found in the various i18n systems concerns 
> cardinal numerals, that is, strings that actually include the number of 
> items. cf. https://qt-project.atlassian.net/browse/QTBUG-5928
I agree with Oswald's arguments in the bug report. Compare the gettext 
plurals documentation at 
https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html 
and look for "There is one case where using ngettext is not appropriate, 
however: namely, when neither of the two strings contains a cardinal 
number.". There's an example that illustrates why ngettext - or the tr 
plurals form - is not appropriate.

Note that this is different from the "zero case" Nicolas asked about. 
But like Masoud, I'm not so sure that this belongs to the plurals facility.

-- 
Jörg Bornemann | The Qt Company