On Mon, 6 Oct 2008, Kai Henningsen wrote:
You're not the first person to come up with this idea, and you
probably won't be the last, but it's a misbegotten idea, and there's
In fact, I believe it came up around the time when COBOL was invented.
And you'll notice that it didn't get implemented back then, even though
people thought it wouldn't be all that hard to do.
a very good reason why it hasn't been done before, and that's not
Actually, that's not true.
In my Apple ][+ days, I've seen it done with BASIC. For some reason, it
never amounted to more than a toy.
I'm sure someone somewhere is doing it to a programming language right
now. Poor language.
Early versions of AppleScript -- a "naturalistic" language with lots of
keywords -- supported a french "dialect" and even Japanese. See page 20 of
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2006/ashopl.pdf
AIUI, the foreign language support was dropped at some point.
Nick
