Re: compiler for Chinese development language

Ganny wrote:
> Ok, one basic question. Why is that the programming languages (like
> C++) have reserved keywords in English? Why not some other
> language/alternative?
>
> Thanks!
> -Ganesh
> [Historically, modern software development started in the US and UK, where
> people speak English. At least as far back as the early 1960s there were
> versions of programming languages with the keywords other languages, but
> they never caught on. A compiler doesn't care of an "if" keyword is
> the two letters IF or SI or the Chinese equivalent, after all. -John]


I used to work with a Russian man who commented that the
Russian-language variant of (I think) Ada that he's used in the 80s
was very awkward because Russian is a heavily inflected language -
much more so than English - and everything looked very strange
because, though the words were Russian, the word forms were invariably
wrong for the context.


I suppose that could have been corrected by having the scanner accept
all the variants of a word as a single token, though that might take
too big a bite out of the namespace, I suppose.


What do others whose first language is other than English think?


  - ken

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