Handling inflections in combinations of words

[thielema]

In the Hledger project we have phrases
like "monthly balance" or "yearly income statement".
In English we can simply concatenate the period attribute and the report name,
but e.g. in German we need to inflect the period attribute
according to the gender of the report name,
e.g. "jährliche Bilanz", but "jährlicher Bericht".

I want to have a message
with (at least) two parameters period and report-type
that I can call like report-title (period: "yearly", type: "balance")
that translates to either "yearly balance" or "jährlicher Saldenbericht".
If that is not possible
I want a message for every report type with the period as parameter.
I want to reduce the number of combinations
by deriving the gender of the report name
and use that to inflect the period attribute.

I tried to achieve that with selections
but eventually I cannot pass the gender to the period messages:

        period-yearly = { $gender ->
            [feminine] Jährliche
            [masculine] Jährlicher
           *[default] Jährlich
          }
        period-quarterly = { $gender ->
            [feminine] Vierteljährliche
            [masculine] Vierteljährlicher
           *[default] Vierteljährlich
          }
        period-monthly = { $gender ->
            [feminine] = Monatliche
            [masculine] = Monatlicher
           *[default] Monatlich
          }
        -get-period = { $period ->
            [yearly] period-yearly
            [quarterly] period-quarterly
            [monthly] period-monthly
           *[default] ""
        }

        balance-report   = { -get-period(gender: "masculine") } Saldenbericht
        income-statement = { -get-period(gender: "feminine") } Einkommenüberschussrechnung

I tried to solve the problem with attributes
but the problem stays the same:

        period-yearly =
            .feminine = Jährliche
            .masculine = Jährlicher
        period-quarterly =
            .feminine = Vierteljährliche
            .masculine = Vierteljährlicher
        period-monthly =
            .feminine = Monatliche
            .masculine = Monatlicher
        -get-period = { $period ->
            [yearly] period-yearly
            [quarterly] period-quarterly
            [monthly] period-monthly
           *[default] ""
        }

        balance-report   = { -get-period.masculine } Saldenbericht
        income-statement = { -get-period.feminine } Einkommenüberschussrechnung

[yudin-s]

You are close, but the missing piece is that Fluent does not give you a dynamic “return this other message/term and call it” reference.

In your first example, the variants of -get-period are just text values like period-yearly; they are not evaluated as a second reference to the period-yearly message. In the second example, the same issue shows up as -get-period.masculine: the attribute has to be on a concrete term, not on the result of a dynamic lookup.

The usual Fluent shape is to put the reusable grammar in a term, parameterize that term, and then call it from each report title. The Fluent guide explicitly supports term parameters, and it also describes term attributes as private grammatical metadata that can be used as selectors.

For example:

-period-label =
    { $period ->
        [yearly] { $gender ->
            [feminine] Jährliche
            [masculine] Jährlicher
           *[other] Jährlich
        }
        [quarterly] { $gender ->
            [feminine] Vierteljährliche
            [masculine] Vierteljährlicher
           *[other] Vierteljährlich
        }
        [monthly] { $gender ->
            [feminine] Monatliche
            [masculine] Monatlicher
           *[other] Monatlich
        }
       *[other] { "" }
    }

-balance-report = Saldenbericht
    .gender = masculine

-income-statement = Einkommenüberschussrechnung
    .gender = feminine

balance-report = { -period-label(period: $period, gender: -balance-report.gender) } { -balance-report }
income-statement = { -period-label(period: $period, gender: -income-statement.gender) } { -income-statement }

That still leaves you with one public message per report type, but it keeps the period inflection table in one place and keeps the report gender next to the report term.

If the application really wants to call one report-title(period, type) message with a dynamic type, then the dispatch over report types has to be explicit somewhere: either in application code by choosing balance-report vs income-statement, or in one Fluent select that enumerates those known report types. Fluent will not dynamically construct a term id from $type and then read that term's .gender.

If this matches the constraint you hit, please mark it as answered so the “term parameters yes, dynamic term references no” distinction is easier to find.

[thielema]

I think your proposed solution works in principle. Unfortunately, currently the Haskell implementation fluent-syntax misses the possibility to pass variables or full expressions to parameterized terms. I opened an issue for fluent-syntax to address the problem:
https://codeberg.org/ida-org/IDA/issues/34