[dholowiski]

This is why even us die hard php coders sometimes yearn for RoR. .to_spanish !

[nwmcsween]

Not trying to be pedantic but the gem has nothing to do with ror - it just extends the string class and adds to_x methods for each language.

[nowarninglabel]

http://code.google.com/p/gtranslate-api-php/

$gt = new Gtranslate; echo "Translating [Ciao mondo] Italian to English => ".$gt->it_to_en("Ciao mondo");

[rbanffy]

I think your example demonstrates very well why one would yearn for Ruby. The ability to give an extra method to a base class allows you to build very expressive code.

edit: and, BTW, the to_spanish method is not defined in the https://github.com/jimmycuadra/to_lang/blob/master/lib/to_la... module.

[troels]

You're quite right, but in all fairness, the following would be a saner interface in php:

    italian_to_spanish("Ciao mondo");

[arethuza]

Even boring old C# can do that.

[ryanpetrich]

Not true. That's just a compiler trick

[Tomek_]

But still not as elegant as: echo "Ciao mondo"->it_to_en(); would be.

[viraptor]

It's only elegant until you have two libraries which want to add `foo` to a `Bar`. Then you're in the world of pain compared to writing `lib1->foo($myBar);`

[Tomek_]

Actually I agree, I'm rather against giving programmers ability to extend native objects at free will, but I'm still for strings being objects in PHP, or even having "everything-is-an-object" approach there.

[steveklabnik]

I'd rather have the common case be gorgeous and have the uncommon case require a some workaround, than have every case look like crap.

[dholowiski]

Thank you for proving my point.

[alxp]

Drupal's localization infrastructure is quite nice. Instead of 'echo' you use the function t() which lets users use a GUI to translate all tokens in a Drupal site.