I play live action roleplaying games (LARPs), where myself and the players around me adopt actual physical characters.
I've had a problem in the past where I hold a gun and want to shoot someone, but don't have their attention. Probably trying to shoot them in the back or something. If I shoot ...
@all - I've got a database of translations, and I want to support plurals. Should each plural form be a separate row, with a plural_form column indicating which form it is. Or should I add 5 columns to support up to 6 plural forms (maximum as far as I'm aware, e.g. Arabic)
The former seems proper, however, the latter is just more convenient (I don't need to group records when I pull them from the database), and I can't imagine languages starting to increase the number of plural forms. And if they did I could just add more columns...
another interesting case: sometimes the plural is exactly the same as the singular. option 1 would save the entire row, option 2 would require duplication, right?
on the other hand … most of the translation strings are probably more than one word, so that would justify different entries
@toscho Option 2 would only require one row. But option 1 would always require 2, otherwise how would you distinguish between plural & singular translation being identical from no plural translation provided?