Re: compiler for Chinese development language

On 19 Oct 2005 02:41:39 -0400, Ken Rose wrote:


> 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


I never heard about Russian Ada. Anyway it couldn't be Ada 83, because
the language standard does not allow this [nasty, ugly] idea. But I
saw Russian COBOL, Algol 60 / 68. There also were numerous dead-born
Russian programming languages, Rapira comes first in mind.


> 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.


Right, it was just a pain to read programs in such localized
languages. Missing endings is not the only problem. Russian words are
twice as long as the corresponding English ones. So the Russian
equivalents were usually abbreviated, usually by omitting vowels,
inviting you to perform deciphering exercises while reading, and while
writing, guess how many ways exist to abbreviate the same Russian
word? Add here that Cyrillic courier fonts are rather heavy and
dense. The letters for many consonants have glyphs above and under the
base line. The result is disgusting and completely defeats the idea of
readability.


BTW, I believe that the unpopularity of Algol 68 in Russia could be
partially addressed to the fact that all program samples and the
keywords in the Russian edition of the Report were translated into
Russian.


--
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

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