Re: localized keywords, was call by name

glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:

>> The requirements for programs in non-English countries
>>have rarely been been reflected in programming languages (standard
>>libraries), character sets etc.
>
> Not to mention keywords.
>
> I have wondered about what non-english speakers think about the
> english keywords used in the usual programming languages.

Formal (programming...) languages are not subject to nationalization,
only natural languages are. This includes numerical constants and
string quotes, which in source code never should be affected by
national conventions about punctuation. Did you know that German
strings were quoted like ,,literal", whereas in English (TeX, GNU...)
texts I often found `literal'?

Imagine what your Internet browser would do, receiving a page written in
e.g. German or Chinese HTML?


> It might be that some use a preprocessor to replace language appropriate
> keywords, but I believe most just use the usual english words.

I remember an old homecomputer (Laser), which allowed for a list of
keyword translations for the BASIC language. Not a bad idea, provided
that the token code still used the same token, and used the list only
for display and editing purposes.

While a preprocessor may be a solution for users of basically Latin
character sets, I also remember attempts to translate programming
languages into Russian, what certainly would make sense when Cyrillic
(Greek...) keyboards don't have ASCII keys at all. But unfortunately
the Russian keywords were much longer than the English ones...

Microsoft once had decided to nationalize VBA, with the very welcome
effect that my German WinWord could not be affected by foreign malware
macros <BG>. This bad decision was corrected *very* soon...

DoDi
[Back around 1960 I believe there were a lot of Fortran variants with
the keywords in local languages, but they all disappeared for the
obvious reason that it wrecked portability. -John]