On Thu, 3 Jul 1997, Unicode Discussion wrote:
> >I'm glad someone pointed this out. Although C (and Java) keywords are in
> >English (this is debatable (^_^)), a programmer of any native language
> >can memorize a handful of reserved words, etc.. Just because you're a
> >programmer doesn't mean you can read/write English.
>
> I used 2 Japanese programming languages that had Japanese keyword
> (MIND and PPP(?)). They were hideous, even for Japanese programmers,
> who found them most confusing. I seem to remember that all the
> keywords were Kanji, and people couldn't figure out how to read them.
That may be a problem of the spec (which should supply readings),
and not of the general idea. Another problem may be that the Japanese
language inherently has a postfix sentence structure, but languages
modeled on English examples have a prefix structure.
Also, for some people, it is better to use a foreign language, because
this can make it easier to distinguish between everyday meanings and
strict logical meanings of things such as "and" and "or".
Using native-language keywords also has the problem that you create
different versions of a language, and you need special transforming
software.
So use of arbitrary scripts in programming languages is probably
mostly useful for identifiers (variable names,...) but less for
keywords.
Regards, Martin.
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