VMD-L Mailing List

From: Axel Kohlmeyer (akohlmey_at_cmm.chem.upenn.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 04 2008 - 11:57:08 CST

On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Alba Colet Subirachs wrote:

hi,
 
ACS> I'm an university student and I'm working in 3D viewing of VMD as a
ACS> teacher assistant. Also, I'm doing a research to translate the VMD
ACS> package from english to spanish or catalan, and I'm interested to

please note, that the following is my very personal opinion
and that this does not necessarily reflect the view of the
VMD developers and support people in the Schulten group.

VMD does not use any native language support tools,
hence a translation would be a herculean task. also it
does not add any functionality, so i have serious doubts
if anybody would want to clutter code by having to maintain
translation tables etc. furthermore, i personally consider
NLS as being dangerous as due to differences in e.g. representation
of numbers, it can easily break parsing in scripts and so on.

i'd rather recommend to spend time on teaching people english
that translating scientific software, not to mention that many
technical terms are english anyways and that for others there
is no good translation or translations will change the semantics.

finally, if people write scripts (and e-mails) in 7-bit ASCII
and english, a much larger number of people can help in case
of problems.

ACS> know if there is anyone that's doing the same and could help me.
ACS> Anyway It will be so grateful, If you can suggest me how can I
ACS> start working.

usually the best way to ask question about VMD development is
to contact vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu, but i am certain that most of the
relevant people will read your mail here also and that you'll
get an authoritative response from the 'official' VMD folks as well.

this is also the way how you can get (read-only) access to the
VMD cvs tree, which is essentially a prerequisite for contributing
code to VMD, as it reduces the amount of work needed to integrate
your code into the development tree and thus lowers the barrier
getting your changes integrated at all.

it may also help, if you state what platform you want to do
development on and what your expertise in C/C++ programming is.

cheers,
   axel.

ACS>
ACS> Thanks.
ACS> Alba Colet Subirachs.
ACS> alba6886_at_hotmail.com
ACS> Barcelona, Spain
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-- 
=======================================================================
Axel Kohlmeyer   akohlmey_at_cmm.chem.upenn.edu   http://www.cmm.upenn.edu
   Center for Molecular Modeling   --   University of Pennsylvania
Department of Chemistry, 231 S.34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6323
tel: 1-215-898-1582,  fax: 1-215-573-6233,  office-tel: 1-215-898-5425
=======================================================================
If you make something idiot-proof, the universe creates a better idiot.