I suspect you can't get away without the #s since it gets annoying to stuff everything into a variable to get the substitution. I would
think if you wanted to provide guidance to translators you could
do something like:
Error: A @class:1@ must have no @classes:2@ to be deleted.
where the class bit is simply for the benefit of translators and
is ignored and in adp files you could omit the number. You then
just tell translators to leave anything in @s alone.
I had a quick grep through the .po files I had and did not see very many instances of reordered strings. Gettext does not have any hinting like this (simply the ability to say %#$s where #$ is the
arg number) and people seem to be able to work with it. Then again there is more text in OpenACS than in a typical program so the extra
hinting would probably be helpful.
