Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

John Levine wrote:

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.

With one glaring exception: A financial package we used worldwide in Hydro had such single-key macros, based on the first letter of the command. This worked great everywhere since we used the US English version worldwide.
The exception was in France where you have to pay a pretty significant fine (in the form of substantial pay rises) for any worker who had to interact with anything not written in French, so there we had the localized version of the package, and none of those key macro functions worked as-is.
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"