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I know that C++ and probably most programming languages were meant to stay in english, but has a port to other real languages ever been considered or even done for C++? I mean, what makes english so special? I have always seen english as a bad, unorganized language anyways(not that any other language is better).
If I'm not mistaken, I've read on the Daily WTF that Excel macro language (?) has been localized and it seems just to be creating more problems (documents created in one country cannot be used in other countries?)
As to English being bad, syntactically it seems to be one of the simplest languages (for example, it has very little declination, no genders and such). Plus, it doesn't have special characters (the ASCII chart is modeled after English).
And of course, if you really want to (feature on TDWTF yourself), it should be very simple to localize all the keywords (it is undefined behaviour, though):
Probably won't work for standard libraries, but perhaps you could create wrappers for everything?Code:#define wenn if
#define für for
#define weil while
...
And this belongs in General discussion...
English is the lingua franca of programming. Seriously, a very large percentage of everyone who programs (or probably who deals with computers in general) uses (or knows) English.
I'm pretty sure it's in the GNU coding standards: comment your programs in English, because it's so widely understood.
It's probably a side-affect of having so many North American programmers. :)
The problem with a computer language based on non-english is that it is only available to those that speak that particular language. A very large proportion of the world are capable of speaking some english - which is more than can be said about German, French, Swedish, Dutch, and most other languages. Sure, there are more people speaking Chinese (and probably one or two of the languages in India) than there are speaking English, and there's a large number of spanish speakers. But for computer programming, you need a decent amount of education, at which point it's likely that you also have a basic level of English as well.
The details/preciseness of the natural (human) language is irrelevant to the computer language implementation because the meaning of each word is (assuming a sane implementation) is precisely defined - rather than the natural language where a word can have many meanings.
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Mats
Its the most spoken language in the developed world.Quote:
Originally Posted by lruc
I have been worked for two larger companies when I lived in Sweden. Both of these companies had as standard to write documentation and comments in English.
I know of German and French companies that have the same standard.
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Mats
That would be my answer, as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by abachler
It would make the world better if there was only one language.
English is pretty much the de-facto standard language, so why would they not model it after english?
IMO, English's distinguishing factor is that its alphabet fits into a signed char, which only has less importance now than it did in the 30s and 40s. Other languages such as Chinese would not have had the room for their alphabet. So apart from that, I won't be accused of ethnocentrism.
It would be nice if English had 1 letter for each possible sound, rather than having to use things like 'th' or 'sh' and 1 meaning for every word. It would greatly simplify the language. But it is what it is, so what can you do?
Learn Esperanto. :)
Well, most of the modern computer languages were developed in the US Universities and companies between 1950-1970 , such as Fortran, Cobol, Algol, etc. The US defence industry was one of the instigators to this. Some where developed elsewhere, and/or later, but generally still in English. Erlang is a language that was developed in Sweden, but it is still using English as the "natural" language.Quote:
Originally Posted by citizen
There are of course exceptions - but as Anon pointed out, you get problems with multiple source language source code if the language is not the same all over the world.
Another exception is APL, which uses "no language", as in it uses special symbols to indicate the operations, functions etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)
I'm sure they had computers in China in the 60's, but it would not have a very wide coverage.
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Mats
>>It would be nice if English had 1 letter for each possible sound, rather than having to use things like 'th' or 'sh' and 1 meaning for every word. It would greatly simplify the language. But it is what it is, so what can you do?
I agree completly, and unforunatly, nothing except complain. I don't think time is laid out all that well either, but it standard, so why mess with it? If only everything was as simple and well thought out as the metric system.
In the late 1800's and early 1900's, several of the European languages went through a reform to simplify/standardize the spelling to pronunciation correllation - for example Spanish and Italian have such "strict correlation between spelling and how it sounds" - there are a few rules besides "what does letter <x> sound like", such as "ch" is pronounced "k" [why not use K one can ask, but so it is], and "gn" is pronounced more like "nj" or "ny", so "gnochi" is not pronounced the way it looks for someone from outside of italy, but "nyoki".
George Bernard Shaw was one to propose such reform. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform
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Mats
Study more philology if you want to know why English is spelled the way it is. Much of the argument for spelling reform comes from the (alleged) proliferation of dyslexia and illiterates, and whether or not they're more important than our language's history. That's a rather blunt way to say it, but I'm assuming bad spelling is less of a barrier than it used to be to student's and people in the professional world.
I also saw something kind of funny that demonstrated the horror of reformed spelling, but I won't be able to find it. :(
I'm pretty sure there was a "German C" compiler. Basically, all the keywords had German replacements. The standard library might have been translated, too.
And of course there's Lingua Romana Perligata.
I know what you mean! Is this it?Quote:
I also saw something kind of funny that demonstrated the horror of reformed spelling, but I won't be able to find it. :(
[edit] Incidentally, I was reading through the Debian package list and found gpt. http://packages.debian.org/lenny/devel/gpt [/edit]Quote:
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English” .
In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kanhave one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where! more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as
replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
The spelling "ghoti" is a stretched (bizarre) version of a regular english noun. Without googling, do you know what it is?Quote:
Originally Posted by citizen
I've also seen someone come up with a "if you reform english spelling, you end up with german", which was at one point published in one of the daily papers under Jeremy Clarkson's authorship, but I had at that point seem something very closely related before that, so I think it was somewhat less unique than it was made out to be.
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Mats
If you reform German spelling, you end up with Dutch, though.
"unt fertik war ti niterlantise sprake"
OMFG dwks, stop it, you are killing me with that ........ :) I couldnt stop laughing...
I thought it was pretty good, too. :) I'm a little surprised you haven't seen it before, though. I've seen it at least twice before somewhere on the internet.
(In case it wasn't clear: I didn't write it, I found it in google.)
Well, I generally don't get into the whole 'why english' debate often. I know a lot of people that have trouble learngin languages want everyone to learn their language, but honestly there are so many good reasons for english to be the world languge that I usually just ignore the counter-arguements.
Well I am of the mindset that perhaps it is a tad arrogant to ask everyone to learn your language so that you do not have to learn theirs. But that is just me. My only real contribution to this discussion is that programming languages are typically written in English since that is how it has been in the past and how it will probably remain for some time. You don't need to learn the entire language. You would only need to learn some VERY basic English to write code.
Furthermore, even those of us who are fluent can point out that our fluency in English doesn't make some programming syntax any more intuitive. Case in point, for loops.
Which essencially say "for each variable that is of within a given parameter while incremented in the given way..." Which is dandy when spelled out like that. But I would say if you showed for(x=0; x <= ARRAY_BOUNDARY; ++x) to an English pprofessor, he would have no idea what it meant.
So in summary, it is what it is, and I am game to learn language that has syntax in a foreign tongue, but it just hasn't come up yet.
I've had an interesting idea for quite a while about creating a whole new language from scratch.
1 letter for every unique sound.
1 word = 1 meaning.
Arranging the words so that the ones used most often are the shortest.
Arranging the spelling so that it's harder to make dyslexic 'read errors' if you're reading quickly, or when you're talking.
And I also thought it would be interesting if it were more object oriented. i.e. nouns would have a base class that makes up the beginning of the word, then adds more word fragments to make up the rest of the word. That way, even if you've never heard of that specific word before, you should understand at least part of it from it's base class. ex. Human could be something like: OrganismMammalBipedalHuman (except much shorter in the new language)
Umm, english is already liek that, you shoudl study orthography. Only instead of callign it a base class, its called the root.
But it isn't consistent, and has a lot of words without a root ("Human" for example).Quote:
Originally Posted by abachler
That's because human IS the root.Quote:
Originally Posted by cpjust
And then, how would I refer to a human who specifically happens to have one leg: OrganismMammalMonopedalHuman?Quote:
Human could be something like: OrganismMammalBipedalHuman
Perhaps we should all use Klingon? That way everyone could be equally offended by it not being their native language.
Microsft Access has localized keywords for SQL queries. It was a pretty scary sight.
Personally I don't think it makes any difference. The language is C++ (or whatever). Go up to an English speaking person who isn't a programmer and ask them what the 'for' or 'virtual' keywords are for and he wouldn't be able to tell you. The fact that he speaks English doesn't give him any kind of advantage here. Ultimately, learning a few English keywords is trivial when trying to learn how the language works and how to program in general.
Comments are slightly different, I imagine you would write these with your target audience in mind. If the majority of those can use English, then it's only logical to write your comments in English.
Actually "weil" means "because", you want "während".Quote:
Originally Posted by anon
I knew someone once, who developed his own preprocessor that would replace his german keywords with the english equivalent. But to be honest those 20 or so frequently-used keywords aren't that hard to learn.
QuantumPete
Oh I would definitely disagree with that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stonehambey
Since I'm fluent in English, when I see a function that I've never seen before, I can usually make a pretty accurate guess as to what it does just from the name. If functions looked more like this:
Then I'd probably just give up and go work at McDonalds.Code:fdfasd( "%d fdsjkjlkjsf %s!", ruios, vbios );
tjkeio( ruios++ );
iowmdiflw::fuivmwi fsjis( vbios );
...
Why would it be UB?Quote:
Originally Posted by anon
I was probably wrong, I though about redefining keywords (such as #define private public) which this is not.
cpjust I love your idea. If I could I would totally abolish English and replace it with an improved version of that but of course it's not that simple. I also guess I wasn't the first person to thing of a new language. Just because something has been stadard for some time (english) doesn't mean that it shouldn't be replaced(e.g. Windows).
I notice that MSVC 2008 accepts pretty much any char in variable names. It is not very portable, but on the other hand, when you are moving an equation directly from paper to code, it can be very clear as to what is going on.
AFAIK, the standard only allows english chars a-z and numbers, not any other chars in variables. It's a shame, says I.
Not quite. The standard guarantees that these work (plus the underscore). However, it says that it is implementation-defined whether, and which, other characters are allowed in variable names.
Thus, any code that goes outside the guaranteed range is not portable, but not necessarily invalid either.
Well, that pretty much guarantees that the use of any non-english character and numbers in variable names is undefined, as many other things.
Not undefined. You either get a compiler error, or it works.
Fair enough, I didn't really consider stuff like the STL and pre-existing functions, in which case a knowledge of English would give you an advatage :)Quote:
Originally Posted by cpjust
The standard C library being an exception ;)
I prefer to only use irregular characters for personal applications that I only plan on compiling for my benefit. As I mentioned, its nice to have code that looks like:
Example:
But these sorts of lines of code don't translate well across all compilers. However, if you are taking something from paper and applying it directly to your program, this makes life so much cleaner.Code:∆t = +(t[0] - t[1]);
ө = atan(∆t) + 1;