OpenEuphoria

Re: international language support

• Posted by brian_keene at yahoo.com Aug 16, 2001
• 459 views

Igor:
Since you've asked for opinions from the peanut gallery (the rest of
the group).  Here's mine.

Using a straight word substitution between languages won't work for the
following reasons:

1. You may be able to translate the keywords, but all error messages
   are still going to be in English.  So the user must still know
   English to develop the program.
2. Syntax translation is just the beginning.  Grammatical & linguistic
   translations must be done as well which can't be done with a simple
   table approach.
3. Many languages (chinese, korean, japanese, russian, etc.) need more
   than the 7 bit ASCII character set.  My understanding is that EU as
   well as most PL's (prog. Langs.) aren't designed to handle the 8 bit
   UNICODE standard as part of their language keywords.  Although a
   preprocessor if correctly written could handle this.  But this makes
   the preprocessor much more complex.
4. Then there's what was mentioned before about words in 1 language
   after being translated conflicting with other parts of the prog.

This subject was wrestled with many years ago in Bell Laboratories
by people I worked with (who were MUCH MUCH MUCH smarter then me) who
finally gave up this idea and decided to leave their C compilers in
English. Since even at that time (~1980) they felt that English was
becoming the universal language in computer programming.

In retrospect, this was very egotistical of them.  But I suspect it was
more of an excuse for them to get out of having to solve a problem they
couldn't se a solution for.

Just my 2 cents (my opinion)

Regards
Brian Keene

--- Igor Kachan <kinz at peterlink.ru> wrote:
> 
> Hi Rolf,
> 
> >Hi all English understanding folks on this list!
> 
> Why only "English understanding folks" for programming ?
> 
> <snip>
> >I'm sure, (I know it from my children
> >from preschool times) children will easily keep
> >the few English items like
> >'for while do next if then else ...',
> >much faster the adults.
> >Let me state it plain:
> >I's nonsense (at least today)
> >to transcribe a PL into an other language,
> >times of Babylon are gone at least for PLs!
> 
> Do you remember Babel's intention ?
> We have what we have now.
> We just live under times of Babylon now.
> 
> I understand your points very well, but I know excellent
> expert in the area of other science (non computer area)
> who is absolutely *dull* in foreign languages, but wants
> use computer and programming in his job very much.
> He is real END USER. EUPHORIA is his language.
> 
> There are about 360 persons in this list, why some
> of them don't write to us ? Think please.
> 
> Then, switching among different native languages
> for programming language doesn't require any
> translations or transcribeings (is it correct?),
> you just change one table to another.
> The inner *order* of key words in these tables is
> important, not sense of these words.
> Try red.ex for idea.
> 
> I think John is correct, and I like this idea
> of preprocessor, editor is ready.
> 
> Regards,
> Igor Kachan
> kinz at peterlink.ru
> 
> 
> 
> 
>