Re: Unicode in strings

John Savard <quadibloc@servername.invalid> writes:

Remember back in the early 8-bit days of computing, and before them,
when schools were exposing children to PDP-8 computers?
>
Children were learning to program computers in BASIC.
>
Obviously, here, if children in other countries used modified versions
of BASIC that used keywords in their own natural language, it would be
much easier for them to get started with programming than if the
keywords were simply arbitrary strings of letters, taken from a
foreign language of which they may not necessarily have any knowledge.

Logo came in versions for different native languages, but looking at
<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(Programmiersprache)>, it shows
English Logo examples before German Logo examples.  I tried Logo on my
C64; I don't know whether it was in English or German, but in any case
I was not particularly impressed.

The C64 as well as many other home computers came with BASIC, and
BASIC was widely used, and before today I never heard or read any
suggestion to use native-language commands in BASIC.

I have seen some suggestions to provide native-language versions of
Forth, but they never went anywhere (if they were serious).  The main
motivation here seems to have been that it's easy to do that in Forth,
so is there a nail to which we can apply this hammer?  I attend
German-language Forth events where some of the partisipants are not
good enough at English to, e.g., read articles about Forth in English,
but none of them has Germanized his personal Forth system.

Scratch is also designed for children and supports native-language
switching, which eliminates one of the drawbacks of native-language
versions.

Like Logo, Scratch comes out of the MIT, and I wonder if the idea that
programmers have problems with names that are not in their native
language is due to their American background.

If Algol was supposed to be an _international_ algorithmic language,
why weren't its keywords taken from Latin or Esperanto, instead of
English?

Algol 60 does not standardize a program representation in characters
(a grave mistake fixed by most later programming languages, but ).  It
also does not standardize reserved words (aka keywords); instead, it
has symbols that are typically written in bold in publications to
differentiate them from identifiers written in a normal typeface.

It is up to the compiler implementor how the programmer has to provide
these symbols; one way is to surround each such symbol with single
quotes (used in ICT 1900 Algol).  A compiler implementor could instead
(or in addition) support native-language representations of these
symbols, but I am not aware that this has happened.  After all, it's
an international language, not a national language; or maybe such
attempts were made and sunk without much notice, for the same reasons
we have been discussing all along.

Elliot 803 Algol uses the reserved word approach that means that
programs don't work that use, e.g., "if" as identifier, but has the
advantage that you don't need to put that many single quotes in the
code.  This is the approach that won in later programming languages,
but it makes it hard to introduce new reserved words in later versions
(they may conflict with existing programs).

As for why the Algol standard was written in English and used names
from English rather than from Latin, that's because Algol was designed
in 1960 when English was the lingua franca among scholars, not before
~1700 when Latin served that role.  And Esperanto never reached that
status.

But concerning Latin, on the last EuroForth conference (near Rome)
Ulrich Hoffmann gave an amusing talk where he presented a Latinized
Forth complete with Roman numerals.  Unfortunately, that talk is not
(yet?) online.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>