[Tagged OT, because I guess we are getting to be, and I won't prolong this
thread unduly.]
Joe Buck wrote on 06 October 2008 19:11:
> Rüdiger Müller wrote on 06 October 2008 17:55:
>
> [ proposal to localize keywords: replace if/else/return etc with
> equivalents from the local language ]
>
> On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 06:42:17PM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
>> God no. Think of the maintenance nightmare.
>
> I guess it's easy for native English speakers like Dave and me to object
> (and be thankful that we didn't live 80 years ago, when the leading
> physics and engineering journals were in German).
>
> A reserved word is in essence a symbol
<shrugs> I don't really think the use of native language words even gives
all that much of a comprehension advantage, even to fairly beginning
programmers. Like you say, it's a fairly arbitrary symbol; if people are
capable of learning A/PL, then they probably wouldn't find it all that hard to
learn any arbitrary symbol's relationship to an operation.
> Determined users are still free to write
>
> #define falls if
>
> and the like, though I would have thought "wenn" would be more correct in
> conveying the sense in which "if" is used in C (though my German is very
> limited).
And that's the essence of the problem. You can't translate word-by-word and
still get meaningful sentences out. Even in the mainstream European languages
there are enough differences in contextual semantics and just plain old
word-order that it wouldn't really end up being a very meaningful translation
technique; to a native speaker most code would just end up looking like
gibberish.
cheers,
DaveK
--
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....
