[loc-en-dev] he/iw issue

[Yoshito Umaoka]

On 12/10/2010 1:36 PM, Naoto Sato wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I cannot seem to remember why we dropped he/iw lookup in 
> ResourceBundle. The design notes 
> (http://sites.google.com/site/openjdklocale/design-notes/resource-bundle-lookup-order) 
> just mentions:
>
> Note: Special Case 1 is removed. If someone really need resources to 
> be tagged by he/yi/id, he/she should use ResourceBundle.Control to 
> control the behavior.
>
> What was the reason we dropped this? It seems to me it is asking too 
> much for applications to provide a custom ResourceBundle.Control for 
> the legit ISO639 language codes.
>
> Naoto
>

Several reasons. Unlike other special cases, there is no way to create a 
locale with language code "he"/"yi"/"id". Therefore, you cannot 
represent them in the candidate Locale list used by resource bundle. It 
is still possible to look for both _he and _iw with a candidate Locale 
iw, but we did not see much value with this implementation - what we get 
with this is just allowing people to use either he or iw, while the 
downside is additional cost to look up these variants.

-Yoshito