108 lines
4.2 KiB
ReStructuredText
108 lines
4.2 KiB
ReStructuredText
========
|
|
Glossary
|
|
========
|
|
|
|
.. glossary::
|
|
|
|
"Everything but the kitchen sink"
|
|
An English idiom meaning to include nearly everything that you can
|
|
think of.
|
|
|
|
API version
|
|
Version that is meant for computer consumption. This version is
|
|
parsable and comparable by computers. It contains information about
|
|
a library's API so that computer software can decide whether it works
|
|
with the software.
|
|
|
|
ASCII
|
|
A character encoding that maps numbers to characters essential to
|
|
American English. It maps 128 characters using 7bits.
|
|
|
|
.. seealso:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
|
|
|
|
ASCII compatible
|
|
An encoding in which the particular byte that maps to a character in
|
|
the :term:`ASCII` character set is only used to map to that character.
|
|
This excludes EBDIC based encodings and many multi-byte fixed and
|
|
variable width encodings since they reuse the bytes that make up the
|
|
:term:`ASCII` encoding for other purposes. :term:`UTF-8` is notable
|
|
as a variable width encoding that is :term:`ASCII` compatible.
|
|
|
|
.. seealso::
|
|
|
|
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-width_encoding
|
|
For another explanation of various ways bytes are mapped to
|
|
characters in a possibly incompatible manner.
|
|
|
|
code points
|
|
:term:`code point`
|
|
|
|
code point
|
|
A number that maps to a particular abstract character. Code points
|
|
make it so that we have a number pointing to a character without
|
|
worrying about implementation details of how those numbers are stored
|
|
for the computer to read. Encodings define how the code points map to
|
|
particular sequences of bytes on disk and in memory.
|
|
|
|
control characters
|
|
:term:`control character`
|
|
|
|
control character
|
|
The set of characters in unicode that are used, not to display glyphs
|
|
on the screen, but to tell the display in program to do something.
|
|
|
|
.. seealso:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_character
|
|
|
|
grapheme
|
|
characters or pieces of characters that you might write on a page to
|
|
make words, sentences, or other pieces of text.
|
|
|
|
.. seealso:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme
|
|
|
|
I18N
|
|
I18N is an abbreviation for internationalization. It's often used to
|
|
signify the need to translate words, number and date formats, and
|
|
other pieces of data in a computer program so that it will work well
|
|
for people who speak another language than yourself.
|
|
|
|
message catalogs
|
|
:term:`message catalog`
|
|
|
|
message catalog
|
|
Message catalogs contain translations for user-visible strings that
|
|
are present in your code. Normally, you need to mark the strings to
|
|
be translated by wrapping them in one of several :mod:`gettext`
|
|
functions. The function serves two purposes:
|
|
|
|
1. It allows automated tools to find which strings are supposed to be
|
|
extracted for translation.
|
|
2. The functions perform the translation when the program is running.
|
|
|
|
.. seealso::
|
|
`babel's documentation
|
|
<http://babel.edgewall.org/wiki/Documentation/messages.html>`_
|
|
for one method of extracting message catalogs from source
|
|
code.
|
|
|
|
Murphy's Law
|
|
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."
|
|
|
|
.. seealso:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_Law
|
|
|
|
release version
|
|
Version that is meant for human consumption. This version is easy for
|
|
a human to look at to decide how a particular version relates to other
|
|
versions of the software.
|
|
|
|
textual width
|
|
The amount of horizontal space a character takes up on a monospaced
|
|
screen. The units are number of character cells or columns that it
|
|
takes the place of.
|
|
|
|
UTF-8
|
|
A character encoding that maps all unicode :term:`code points` to a sequence
|
|
of bytes. It is compatible with :term:`ASCII`. It uses a variable
|
|
number of bytes to encode all of unicode. ASCII characters take one
|
|
byte. Characters from other parts of unicode take two to four bytes.
|
|
It is widespread as an encoding on the internet and in Linux.
|