Re: localized keywords, was call by name

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 04:27:31 +0100, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:


> glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
>
>> It might be that some use a preprocessor to replace language appropriate
>> keywords, but I believe most just use the usual english words.


But the preprocessor itself should be localized as well... (:-))


> While a preprocessor may be a solution for users of basically Latin
> character sets, I also remember attempts to translate programming
> languages into Russian, what certainly would make sense when Cyrillic
> (Greek...) keyboards don't have ASCII keys at all. But unfortunately
> the Russian keywords were much longer than the English ones...


I remember a revised Algol 68 report published in USSR. All keywords were
translated into Russian. Because Russian is a heavily inflected language
with, as you said, comparably long words, they used abbreviations. It was
an utter mess. In the bookstore I first saw it, I didn't even considered to
buy the book.


> Microsoft once had decided to nationalize VBA, with the very welcome
> effect that my German WinWord could not be affected by foreign malware
> macros <BG>. This bad decision was corrected *very* soon...


Not completely. Excell stays localized. Its German version uses comma for
decimal point, with a devastating effect, as expected...


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

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