Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

According to Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>:

I don't know how Japanese feel about that, but I certainly don't want
to have to use some Germanized form of C or Forth.  This kind of
catering for different natural-language programmers has been tried and
has not taken over the world.  I guess that's because
>
1) You need to learn a lot about what "printf" means and how it is
  used; remembering the name is only a minor aspect.
>
2) Having a name common on all the world allows you to read programs
  from all over the world, use reference material from all over the
  world, etc.
>
A similar concept was implemented in COBOL, where the designers though
that having to write
>
ADD A TO B GIVING C
>
or somesuch makes programming easier than writing
>
C = A+B
>
in FORTRAN. ...

That's a common misconception. The point of having COBOL look like
English wasn't to make it easier to program but to make it easier for
non-programmers to read. Think of an auditor looking at the program to
see if its business logic matches what the company says it does.

Also, I'm with you on localized command languages. Back in the 1980s I
worked on a modelling package called Javelin that had a keystroke
macro language. After going to some effort to provide macro names in
various languages, our foreign customers consistently told us that we
needn't have bothered.

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