On Tue, 15 May 2007 09:38:38 +0200, Duncan Booth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Recently there has been quite a bit of publicity about the One Laptop Per > Child project. The XO laptop is just beginning rollout to children and > provides two main programming environments: Squeak and Python. It is an > exciting thought that that soon there will be millions of children in > countries such as Nigeria, Brazil, Uruguay or Nepal[*] who have the > potential to learn to program, but tragic if the Python community is too > arrogant to consider it acceptable to use anything but English and ASCII.
You could say the same about Python standard library and keywords then. Shouldn't these also have to be translated? One can even push things a little further: I don't know about the languages used in the countries you mention, but for example, a simple construction like 'if <condition> <do something>' will look weird to a Japanese (the Japanese language has a "post-fix" feel: the equivalent of the 'if' is put after the condition). So why enforce an English-like sentence structure? > Yes, any sensible widespread project is going to mandate a particular > language for variable names and comments, but I see no reason at all why > they all have to use English. Because that's what already happens? We definitely are in a globalized world, and the only candidate language having a chance to allow people to communicate with each other is English. Period. And believe me, I don't like that (I'm French, if that can give you an idea about how much I don't...). But that's a fact. Even people knowing the same language sometimes communicate in English just in case they have to widen the discussion to somebody else. To give you a perfect example, I had to discuss just yesterday an answer we had to do to a Belgian guy, who speaks French without any problem. His mail was written in English, and we answered in English. Anyway: > I don't believe that Python should be restricted to people *serious* > about programming. You have a point here. When learning to program, or when programming for fun without any intention to do something serious, it may be better to have a language supporting "native" characters in identifiers. My problem is: if you allow these, how can you prevent them from going public someday? -- python -c "print ''.join([chr(154 - ord(c)) for c in 'U(17zX(%,5.zmz5(17l8(%,5.Z*(93-965$l7+-'])" -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
