Aaron Sherman skribis 2005-04-11 14:49 (-0400): > Yes, but it will be spelled: > use $*LANG ;-) > Seriously, is there some reason that we would not provide a > "Language::Russian" and "Language::Nihongo"? Given Perl 6, it would even > be quite valid for those modules to add aliases for all of the core > functions and keywords, not just global variables.
Because providing it leads to its use, and when it gets used, knowing English is no longer enough. I have some code that uses Dutch variable names. When I show that code to people who can't read any Dutch, they have a hard time finding out what it does and how it works. If even builtin functions become unfamiliar, this figuring out becomes impossible instead of hard, without learning the language it's written in. English sucks in many interesting ways, but at least it's a de facto standard and documentation will be available in it. I'm not even sure I like the *possibility* of using non-ascii letters in identifiers, even. As a 12-year old, I used several BASIC dialects. One time I found a Dutch BASIC. It had "TOON" instead of "PRINT", and "INVOER" instead of "INPUT". Even though these words were in my own language, I found using them hard just because I was used to something entirely different. You could say it only takes some getting used to, but it's easier to get used to one language than to all languages a grammar exists for. And even though I knew when I wrote it that it was a mistake, I used esperato identifiers in Lingua::EO::Supersignoj. You can't imagine how often I've used "new" instead of "nova" since I released that. A next version is going to have English as the primary language, even though I love Esperanto. I do think translating *documentation* is a very good idea. But please let that be an official project, with lots and lots of committers, because every one-man translation operation eventually dies. Juerd -- http://convolution.nl/maak_juerd_blij.html http://convolution.nl/make_juerd_happy.html http://convolution.nl/gajigu_juerd_n.html
