On Dec 17, 2007 6:44 PM, raymond@svn.wikimedia.org wrote:

Revision: 28612 Author: raymond Date: 2007-12-17 23:44:29 +0000 (Mon, 17 Dec 2007)

Log Message:

• Rename new message 'filetype-separator' (r28530) to the more generic message name 'comma-separator'.

Can be useful for other still hardcoded comma separations.

I was thinking more flexibility was better than less. German has about the same punctuation as English, but some languages have pretty weird punctuation conventions, AFAIK. I'm not sure what would make you choose a semicolon instead of a comma right now or vice versa, as far as English goes, but if there is any good reason I'm not sure the same logic would always apply in other languages. So if for some reason one particular list has some odd property (say, in English, possibly including items with commas in them), that language might want to use a different punctuation mark (like a semicolon instead of a comma, in the English example).

Whereas if we have a bunch of different separator messages for different types of lists, that all contain pretty much the same content, what's the problem? Most localizers can ignore them, and those who can't can easily copy-paste and change several separators rather than just one. This is a similar philosophy to how we have at least six different messages containing the text "Go".