Is there a "self-attribute" shorthand? And if not, should there be?

[ilyvion]

I have a bunch of units, defined as follows:

units-unit-liter =
    .symbol = L
    .name = { $count ->
        [one] liter
        *[other] liters
    }
    .symbol-value = {$count} {units-unit-liter.symbol}
    .name-value = {$count} {units-unit-liter.name}

I find it tedious that I have to spell out {units-unit-liter.symbol} within the definition of units-unit-liter itself. I was hoping there'd be a shorthand, such that I could write something like .symbol-value = {$count} {.symbol}, but I couldn't find anything of the sort that worked. I don't really care what the shorthand is (or would be), but I'm annoyed that it seemingly doesn't exist.

Why might one want this? Each time I add a new unit, I have to remember to update not just the name of the translation , but also its attribute usages, if I accidentally forget one, I could end up with bad translations like

units-unit-kilogram =
    .symbol = kg
    .name = { $count ->
        [one] kilogram
        *[other] kilograms
    }
    .symbol-value = {$count} {units-unit-kilogram.symbol}
    .name-value = {$count} {units-unit-liter.name}

and oops, suddenly it says "3 liters" when I translate using the units-unit-kilogram.name-value message¹.

Footnotes

1. Now, arguably this forced repetition of near identical symbol-value/name-value attributes is bad to begin with; it'd be even nicer to have an entirely separate message like units-symbol-value = {$count} {$unit.symbol} that could be re-used by all units, since that message will be identical for each one, but as far as I can tell, there doesn't really seem to be a way to do something like this either. ↩

[eemeli]

To answer the first question: No, there is no such shorthand.

As for whether there should be, that rather depends on whether it's needed. Regarding your example, I have two questions:

1. Why do you need the indirection with the symbol and name properties? Why not include the symbol and name directly in the patterns?
2. Why are you defining these patterns yourself? For example the CLDR contains the same patterns, already available in rather many languages.

[ilyvion]

For 1, it's because I want to display them by themselves without a quantity; here's an example from my UI:

For 2, it's simply because I wasn't aware these were already available. 😅 How would I use these CLDR translations in a Fluent-powered project?

[rkh]

It does sound like you might be trying to put more logic into Fluent than most of us usually do. Maybe go with custom functions instead?

Accessing the data depends on the environment. I'd recommend looking for CLDR/ICU bindings.

If you're in the browser, some but not all of the CLDR is exposed via Intl. Unfortunately, you cannot get unit names without an amount from Intl.DisplayNames (though for other things, it is your friend), but you can grab them via Intl.NumberFormat (which is also what fluent.js uses). formatToParts is your friend if you want to grab only part of the output.

[eemeli]

In case you're using JS for the UI rendering, then many of the units are supported directly by the language:

const nf = new Intl.NumberFormat('en', { style: 'unit', unit: 'gram', unitDisplay: 'long' })
nf.format(0.001) → "0.001 grams"

Note that the list isn't complete, e.g. milligram and microgram are left out. The list of supported unit is available as

Intl.supportedValuesOf('unit')

The raw data (including all units) is available as JSON via the cldr-core package.

Edit: I posted this before I saw Konstantin's reply above, apologies for duplicate content.