Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 21:18:48 +0300
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
Sender: halo1 AT zahav DOT net DOT il
To: JT Williams <jeffw AT darwin DOT sfbr DOT org>
Message-Id: <7458-Tue31Jul2001211847+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il>
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In-reply-to: <20010731121517.B871@kendall.sfbr.org> (message from JT Williams
	on Tue, 31 Jul 2001 12:15:17 -0500)
Subject: Re: gettext port
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> Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 12:15:17 -0500
> From: JT Williams <jeffw AT darwin DOT sfbr DOT org>
> 
> Surely NLS support is a good thing, but I really was shocked at the
> resulting increase in size of the NLS-capable executable.  E.g.,
> sed 3.02.80 with NLS support---even stripped and UPX-compressed---is
> seven times larger than the corresponding 3.02 executable!  I naively
> expected NLS support to involve a few hooks in the application itself,
> with the real nuts and bolts---and code overhead---of the support to
> reside elswhere (e.g., an optional app).

NLS support requires translation between different character sets,
like between ISO-8859-1 and the corresponding DOS codepage 850 (to
pick an example that is relevant for DJGPP).  Each such conversion
requires 2 tables: from the source charset to Unicode and from Unicode
to the target charset.  Taking into consideration how many charsets
are supported, you can imagine the sheer volume of the tables this
requires.  All of those tables are sitting inside the program.