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Non-English Programming Languages? 191

Posted by Cliff from the localized-keywords dept.
jjohnson asks: "As a coder I've been exposed to a lot of programming languages, big and small, and they're all in (pseudo) English, reflecting their invention and development in English speaking countries (or to gain traction in English speaking countries, such as Ruby). Of course, there's no reason a programming language couldn't be developed in Russian, using a cyrillic character set; or Chinese, using kanji; or Japanese, using hiragana. All three of those nations have big/advanced enough developer communities to justify the development of native-tongue programming languages, which have the obvious benefit of not requiring their developers to learn/code in a foreign language. What non-English programming languages exist, and how do they compare?"
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Non-English Programming Languages? More

Non-English Programming Languages?

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  • Google (Score:4, Informative)

    by marco0009 ( 716718 ) <<marco0009> <at> <gmail.com>> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:24AM (#9116353)
    Thank you google for your infinite wisdom:
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/encyclopedia/non_engli sh_based_programming_languages

    • Re:Google (Score:4, Informative)

      by Profane MuthaFucka ( 574406 ) <busheatskok@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:42AM (#9116523) Homepage Journal
      proper link [wikipedia.org]
    • For some reason, it doesn't include APL [acm.org] which, at most, only uses ASCII characters for names and numbers. (The meta-language (e.g., ")SAVE") does use english words.)

    • Re:Google (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sharkdba ( 625280 )
      Thank you google for your infinite wisdom

      It's not wisdom, it's knowledge. Indexed and searchable, but still only knowledge. Wisdom is knowing which information is relevant to context at hand, AND what to do with this knowledge.
      • Thank you google for your infinite wisdom

        It's not wisdom, it's knowledge. Indexed and searchable, but still only knowledge. Wisdom is knowing which information is relevant to context at hand, AND what to do with this knowledge.

        Well, if you want to get so nit picky about it, knowledge and information aren't interchangable either...
        • Well, if you want to get so nit picky about it, knowledge and information aren't interchangable either.

          I'm often reminded of a comment by the instructor in a CompSci class I took back in the 60's, when there were still IBM punch cards easily on hand. He held up two of them, one with lots of holes punched out, and the other one without any holes. He commented that both contain exactly the same amount of "information". 960 bits of information, to be precise.

          This did a lot to get across to the class just

  • lots o' dupes today (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    original 'ask slashdot' article' [slashdot.org]

  • Many of them... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by addaon ( 41825 ) <(addaon+slashdot) (at) (gmail.com)> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:28AM (#9116384)
    Any language which doesn't define a core of keywords, but instead just has functions that can be overridden... and which supports unicode. Variants of lisp anf forth qualify, off the top of my head. Of course, languages with only a few keywords, like java, are amenable to trivial pre-processing of those keywords, and also support unicode right out of the box.
    • I think of the car, cdr, and cons functions in lisp. Now cons is for construct. Car gets you the first element in a list, cdr the the second link (& therefore the remaining list) of a list.
      I heard that car and cdr are are artifacts of machine code mnemomics, which I assume are English. But when you look at the functions, they are now cryptic and esoteric enough that they do not appear language specific. How many languages use cons as an abbreviation for the local equivalent of construct?

      • Re:When you mention lisp (Score:4, Informative)

        by notfancy ( 113542 ) <matias@k-BALDWINbell.com minus author> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @11:48AM (#9117160) Homepage

        CAR [wikipedia.org] (Contents of Address Register) and CDR [wikipedia.org] (Contents of Decrement Register) are effectively mnemonics for what we call nowadays (in ML or Haskell) the hd (head) and the tl (tail) of a list.

        But, since in Latin head is caput and tail is cauda, you could say that CAR stands for CApite Regesta (literally, "what's written at the head") and CDR for CauDa Regesta ("what is written at the tail")! The Classicist purists among you will probably find that a better non-etymology would be "CApitis Recensio" and "CauDae Recensio", but who's worrying anyway. Then of course, you have that CONS [wikipedia.org] is also Latin for "CONStruo".

  • What do you want, universe? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Michael.Forman ( 169981 ) * on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:30AM (#9116398) Homepage Journal

    Klingon Var'aq [geocities.com].

    Example:
    Name: hello, world
    Dialect: English
    Version: 5 June 2000
    Comments: Not the canonical var'aq "hello, world"; actually prints "What do you want, universe?" in Klingon

    ~ nuqneH { ~ 'u' ~ nuqneH disp disp } name
    nuqneH

    Michael. [michael-forman.com]

  • brainfuck (Score:2, Funny)

    by kwoff ( 516741 )
    brainfuck [muppetlabs.com] though, granted, it's still in ASCII.

  • Translated Visual Basic (Score:3, Informative)

    by Scarblac ( 122480 ) <slashdot@gerlich.nl> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:33AM (#9116421) Homepage

    Ah, apparently the submitter hasn't heard of the horror that is (was, I hope) translated VBA. If you had a Dutch version of Office, your Visual Basic was Dutch as well. That is, the language itself. A FOR..NEXT loop was something like a VAN..NAAR loop (I have only seen this stuff, not coded in it).

    I can't find the right Google keywords at the moment to find an example, but it was horrible, and of course totally incompatible with other versions...

    • Re:Translated Visual Basic (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      and of course totally incompatible with other versions...

      That's not true - it's totally compatible, and in fact even translates itself. If you make your Excel document using a French version of Office, and then open the same document in an English version, all the code has miraculously become the standard VBA that we all know and (possibly) love.
      • Still not touching it with a 10 foot pole, so speaking without trying, but... how compatible it could be with "cut and paste" code?

        I could be have the spanish version of Office (urgh), found a nice macro in some web site, try to paste it in a document and found that it don't work because the keywords are all wrong.

        Or worse, think I already know vbs and try to write a macro, then who of the alternate translations of "print" (or whatever uses vb to display text, to put a very basic example) i should use i

    • In older Basic's this was totally compatable by just substituting the keywords. If they were stored as tokens it would even come up in your language instantly.

      Compatability is probably impossible in modern VB or any other language, for two reasons: first there is new syntax rules where the parser cannot use context to figure out if a word is a keyword or a variable name. Second is that everything is stored as text so that formatting by the programmer can be preserved, so there is no tokenized version that

  • None English programming languages? (Score:5, Informative)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:33AM (#9116428) Homepage Journal
    As far as I know there are none.
    The reason is pretty simple. English is probably the most commonly spoken language for business and science on the earth today. Before someone says that there are x billion Chinese yes they are but there are many dialects of Chinese and also of Hindi. Also a very large percentage of the Computer industry is centered in the US. I just do not think that there is any other language that has so many educated speakers. If you want to be an Airline pilot in any country in the world you must speak english. Yes a Russian airline pilot landing in Germany will speak to the towner in english. Or back in the 1800s French was the language of Science. For now it is English that is more or less the universal language.

    • Re:None English programming languages? (Score:4, Funny)

      by LocoBurger ( 18797 ) * on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:52AM (#9116638) Homepage

      Yup, French was pretty universal, at least in the west, hence the phrase 'lingua franca' which practically means 'the language that you can use everywhere' but literally means 'the French language,' (in Latin, no less..). I think..

      Anyway, speaking of French, I knew a guy in college who had programmed C in French. All you need to do is fiddle with where the keywords are defined in the compiler. So he was writing 'durant' and 'pour' loops, along with 'si' statements. Pretty whacky..

      In French, though, 'C++' is 'Ç++'. Cool huh? :)

      • In French, though, 'C++' is 'Ç++'.

        Why would they do that? The letter "C" in French is pronounced much like the word "say" in English. The only point of the cedilla is to soften what would otherwise be a "hard c," such as in façade and François. "C" by itself already has a soft sound.

      • hence the phrase 'lingua franca' which practically means 'the language that you can use everywhere' but literally means 'the French language,' (in Latin, no less..).

        Actually, the sources I've checked [reference.com] suggest that the term is Italian for (second and apparently original definition) "A mixture of Italian with Provençal, French, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish, formerly spoken on the eastern Mediterranean coast.". The etymology I can find suggests that it's Italian for "language of the Franks" (by

    • Re:None English programming languages? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @11:02AM (#9116743) Journal
      An interesting story someone once posted here -- he was living in a Central American country and asked a developer if he found it uncomfortable to code in a foreign language. The developer asked him if he could read music. He could. The developer asked him if he was bothered by the Italian used in the instructions (or whatever they're called). Never occurred to him to worry about it.

      Explained the developer: Well, just like an "allegro" or "pianissimo" is just the historical way music is annotated, "switch" and "if" are, for historical reasons, the way code is written.


      • Explained the developer: Well, just like an "allegro" or "pianissimo" is just the historical way music is annotated, "switch" and "if" are, for historical reasons, the way code is written.

        I'd never thought of it that way before, but it makes sense now (IAAM (I Am A Musician)). "Da Capo" to GOTO the "head" of the musical piece, etc.

        I've always thought that music and mathematics were two universal languages; perhaps programming could be the third?

        Someone else also mentioned that French used to be th

        • there have been four "lingua francas" in history: Greek, Latin, French and English.

          As others have pointed out, Frankish (not to be confused with French) was a lingua franca. For several centuries, if you wanted to study the sciences or mathematics, you did it in Arabic (from whence came our numerals). Swahili has served a similar "common language" role in Africa, and I'm sure there are others from the pre-Columbian Americas, Asia, and other regions.

          • Plenty of 'em (Score:3, Interesting)

            by GCP ( 122438 )
            Written Chinese served the same role in Asia that Latin was serving in Europe. Pasar Melayu ("market Malay") is a language I learned to get by in places from Thailand to Papua New Guinea.

            There have been, and continue to be, lots of linguae francae.

      • Unnecessary (Score:3, Interesting)

        by GCP ( 122438 )
        I've done a lot of work with Japanese developers. They have no more interest in a "Japanese" programming language than they have in a pocket calculator that used kanji digits instead of Western digits.

        The 52 letters, 10 digits, and handful of special characters in ASCII are easy for them to both read and type on local keyboards, and keywords like "if" and "while" are already familiar to most Japanese older than about 10 or so.

        I'm not saying they speak English well. In general, they don't. I'm saying that
    • It also might have something to do with the origins of the technology, most of the original inventing engineers coming from English speaking backgrounds.

      Perhaps had Grace Hopper been German she would have coined the phrase 'Computerwanze' instead of 'Computer Bug'.

    • Or back in the 1800s French was the language of Science.

      Actually I've always read it was German, but your main point still stands.
    • One needs to remember that an imprtant property of English is that it is a lot more structured than many other, et least European, languages. There ar eno gender changes of verbs/adverbs/adjectives. Plurality is easily indicated by adding an 's'. Irregular verbs? But that's just a hash table, if you wish. There is really only one correct way of combining words in a sentence. Words are relatively short.

      Compare that to, say, Slavic languages -- you'd pretty much have to know all relevant "attributes" o

  • Not too difficult... (Score:5, Funny)

    by BobTheJanitor ( 114890 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:33AM (#9116429) Homepage
    With a bit of Lex and Yacc [ds9a.nl], it should be pretty simple to come up with a C++ variant in any given language. When I was in college, some friends of mine and I wrote a compiler in ebonics, called Eubonicode [iastate.edu]. Granted, I don't know how well lex/yacc cover non-ascii character sets, but it wouldn't be hard to whip up a compiler for a French, Spanish, or German version of C++.
    • Oh man that is hilarious.

      Actually as a side project in college I wrote a Pascal to C compiler (wrote it in Pascal) as a hack to get my way through all those pesky C coding homework problems in a hurry. I was a long time Pascal coder and fairly new to C, didn't particularly care for the syntax of C. I would do the C homework in Pascal, run it rhrough my pre-processor to convert the Pascal versions of the homework to C, compile the output in TurboC and Voila! I was done in half the time.

      I have hence learn

  • Bad Idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Captain Rotundo ( 165816 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:37AM (#9116471) Homepage
    I am sure there are or were some non-english programming languages (and even as a native english speaker I've thought about this problem myself). But, and its a big but, right now using english gets you access to the most diverse and largest audience (except maybe mandorin, but even there your talking basically the chinese (mandorin is not generally taught as a second language as widely as english).

    With the internet and the "global economy" it makes NO sence to have a localized language, unless your a proprietary developer that doesn't want you code to have the longest life it could :)

    You may think I am just saying this because I speak english so of course I think english should be the most used, but I honestly can tell you I would be quite happy to learn another language as best I could if english weren't the primary communication language for programming (and most anything really). I would obviously be severely inconvienenced, but no more so that maybe people whose software I use now.

    Maybe the best choice would be to have translatable keywords for a language, because the syntax really doesn't match english in all cases anyway. Of course translatable keywords would become a nightmare quickly due to the severe limitation on variable names etc, for instance how could you ever choose a word and be sure the language wouldn't end up need that for "if" in some language you never heard of?

    As far as different character sets, this becomes a non-issue as all software moves towards unicode and UTF-8 (or equivalent) encoding. Once that happens you can for get about worring about character sets (and its happening fast).

    • Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tux2000 ( 523259 )

      Maybe the best choice would be to have translatable keywords for a language

      Have you ever seen Visual Basic for Applications in a localized version of MS Office? It really hurts the eye. If you have ever coded an advanced hello world programm in nearly any language, you know what a FOR loop looks like. If you look at VBA with translated keywords, you can't see anything but bla bla because of the translated keywords.

      English is very helpful for keywords because you can understand english sentences no matter

      • If you have ever coded an advanced hello world programm in nearly any language

        What, precisely, constitutes an advanced "Hello, world" program???

    • As far as different character sets, this becomes a non-issue as all software moves towards unicode and UTF-8 (or equivalent) encoding. Once that happens you can for get about worring about character sets (and its happening fast).

      Won't happen in our lifetime. If you're a non-native english writer, how many encoding tricks did you learn in your lifetime? in my everyday activities, I have to know at least:

      • ISO-8859-1;
      • UTF-8;
      • Regular Unicode
      • HTML entities (& e a c u t e ; );
      • XML entities (& # 2 3 3
    • The single one reason I write all my code in English, is that no matter were you go, it's likely that even if your code initially only OUTPUTS a language other than English, it's VERY likely that somebody with a different mother tongue than you is going to either want or need to read your code at some point, and there's a HUGE chance that such a person knows enough English to be able to read English code.

      The trouble really is, since most CS related research has been released in English, any developers nee

  • LOGO (Score:2, Insightful)

    by agdv ( 457752 )
    I used to program in LOGO in elementary school, and the version we used was in Spanish. Might have been translated to other languages as well.
    So what if it was interpreted rather than compiled, and it was a very limited program made for children, it was a programming language, so stop laughing, all of you.
    • I used LOGO in French. Maybe it was not the most powerful language, but for a 10-year old that I was, it was perfect...

      Avance 10
      Tourne 90

      It was a really good initiation to what programming is like...

  • Perl ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tux2000 ( 523259 ) <alexander.slashdot@foken@de> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:49AM (#9116603) Homepage Journal
    ... completely without letters if you do it right! ;-)
    • The K Programming Language [kx.com] is language agnostic. Quote: "One of the hardest things for many people to get over at first is the way K looks. Even the strongest K enthusiast will freely admit that K tends to look like line noise." [A Shallow Introduction to the K Programming Language" [kuro5hin.org]]
    • Heh, heh. Good point. I do like to use 2- and 3-letter names in perl, but the real perl hackers tend to disparage my code as readable.

      Back in the 70's, I learned a language (whose name I've forgotten) whose syntax was entirely in the punctuation. You could use letters however you liked, with an interesting rule: Only upper-case letters were noticed by the compiler. Lower-case letters were stripped out (except inside quoted strings).

      This had two interesting effects. One was that the language didn't n

    • Re:Perl ... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by babbage ( 61057 )

      Completely without letters? Slacker. How about a method for removing all those unsightly printable characters [cpan.org]?

      SYNOPSIS

      use Acme::Bleach;
      print "Hello world";

      DESCRIPTION

      The first time you run a program under use Acme::Bleach, the module removes all the unsightly printable characters from your source file. The code continues to work exactly as it did before, but now it looks like this:

      use Acme::Bleach;

      And if that's too much for you, and you just want to smoothe o

  • Translated Hebrew Basic (Score:2, Interesting)

    by udif ( 32355 )
    Back in the DOS days, an Israeli company called "248 software" created a translated BASIC interpreter, complete with Right-to-left line entry:
    5 TO 1 = X FOR 10
    "HELLO" PRINT 20
    NEXT 30
    (sorry for lack of right-alignment - I couldn't get this to work in the comment window. Just assume the lines above are right aligned).

    substitute the regular keywords with the equivalent hebrew words in a hebrew font, and you get the idea.

    Notice that unlike the keywords here which are left-to-right, the hebrew keywords

  • In Russian (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AndyElf ( 23331 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @10:57AM (#9116679) Homepage
    There most certainly were quite a few, and not only programming languages, but also OSes. One of programming languages that comes to my mind is Rapira (). If you do a search you'll get quite a few references to it. I always had a problem with this sort of "localized versions" -- especially in Slavic lannguages: our average word length is longer than English (hence lots of abbreviations in these laguages), most of computer terminolgy is anyway borrowed...

    Just the same I am generally having big problems with localized Excel -- I once saw my mothers excel worksheet (Russian version) and could not figure out half of the formulas!
  • Hello World or &#922;&#945;&#955; &#951;&#956;&#941;&#961;&#945; &#954;&#972;&#963;&#956;&#949; or &#12371;&#12435;&#12395; &#12385;&#12399; &#19990;&#30028;

    [ how ironic that /. wont let you insert html entity refs ]

    Rob Pike & Ken Thompson

    <a href="http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/utf.html " >http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/utf.html</a&gt ;

  • C ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by noselasd ( 594905 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @11:14AM (#9116849)
    "#define" is your friend.(enemy..)

    #define if hvis
    #define do gjør
    #define while sålenge
    #define return returner
    #define void ingenting
    #define char karakter
    #define const konstant
    typedef int tall;

    tall lengde(konstant karakter *p){
    tall i = 0;
    sålenge(*p){
    i++;
    p++;
    }
    returner i;
    }
  • "A Programming Language", which uses Greek letters and special shapes as operators.

    http://www.acm.org/sigapl/

  • Way back, probably in the early 80's, I saw a guy tweak the Tiny Basic on our RCA-based computers, so that all the words were in Finnish. All 12 of them. He called if AKVOK, which was a direct translation of the "Beginners All-purpose Simple Instruction Code" into Finnish "Aloittelijan KaikkiValtias Ohjaus Koodi". For some reason nobody took him very seriously - but we all had great fun!
  • Sometimes it makes more sense to use one language in a particular field regardless of which country you're in. It makes it easier for professionals from different countries to communicate clearly.

    Just like Italian is the language used in music notation, Latin in medical and botanical terms, English is the de facto language of computers.


  • For those masochistic enough, Java supports Unicode for symbol names. Imagine a project that has been outsourced at various times to Russia, India, Mexico, and China, whose developers decided to make full use of the Java Language Specification (not using features is wasteful, right?).

  • Latin (Score:2)

    by Ugmo ( 36922 )
    It is actually a module for Perl to let you write Perl in Latin:

    Perl in Latin [monash.edu.au]

    I guess it was intended as a toy but it could be used as a model for other languages.
  • I have two words for you:

    Accent marks.

  • I saw someone else say this, but the score was 0!!! I hope that wasn't uninformed moderation. :\ Anyway...

    ... you can change most compilers to accept any variation of strings as the tokens by changing the lexer! If you would like C in Finnish, it's a very strait forward task once you settle on words that you want to use. Even change the file format from ASCII to UTF-8! It's just bytes that go into the lexer and then everything is a token.

    Writting a wholey new language doesn't make much sense if you

  • APL (Score:2)

    by sysadmn ( 29788 )
    You're forgetting the granddaddy of them all, APL. oeо...OEZ¼Ss-&#24 7; ± [acm.org] Sheesh, it's greek to me!
  • Not a language per se but a Perl dialect, Lingua::Romana::Perligata [monash.edu.au] allows you to program in something that strongly resembles Latin (that is, if you don't know real Latin to tell the difference).
  • There is a French version of COBOL. Not only are the keywords in French, but the syntax is French, so that, as with English COBOL, statements can be valid sentences in a natural language.

  • AppleScript had the concept of "dialects" which were AppleScript terms written in different languages (they had French, Japanese, Japanese (romanji), German, and Italian working). It was intriguing, I remember actually submitting an AppleScript in French for an assignment in French class in high school circa 1995.

    English:
    the first character of every word whose style is bold

    French:
    le premier caractère de tous les mots dont style est gras

    Above in PDF [utexas.edu]

    Sample of an AppleScript in English and Jap [fpu.ac.jp]

  • Whether you like it or not, English is the de facto standard of computer languages. While it would make sense to write programs in your native language, eventually you will reach the point where you need to work with others around the world.

    While in college, I had to work with graduate students from India and China. We couldn't understand each other all the time, but we could read each other's code. I'm now in industry, but my company does work all over the world. It's pretty normal in my industry to
  • I own a TI-89 calculator, which can be programmed using some flavour of BASIC and also Assembler.
    Usually, the interface and all commands are in English, but TI offers language packs for some other languages. I once loaded the german language pack and realized that I'd have to rewrite all programs because it expected the commands to be in German.
    I am not sure whether this qualifies as a programming language because it's interpreted and not compiled.

  • Programming in a Mother Tongue (Score:3, Informative)

    by Mike Wilson ( 34125 ) on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @02:50PM (#9119275) Homepage

    If I remember correctly, Mitarou Namiki [tuat.ac.jp] wrote a paper exploring this. The reference seems to be:

    T.Souya, E.Hayakawa, M.Honma, H.Fukushima, M.Namiki, N.Takahashi and M.Nakagawa, "Programming in a Mother Tongue: Philosophy, Implementation, Practice and Effect", The 15th Annual International Computer Software & Application Conference, pp.705-721, 1991.9

    See his 1991 papers listing [tuat.ac.jp] and his lab's website [tuat.ac.jp].

    I talked with him about it ten years ago. I have a copy of the paper or maybe a similar one somewhere, but it's in japanese and I never allocated the hours I need to read it.

  • There's definitely a link between language and the way that we think about things.
    Some mathematicians are very interested in one native language here in BC (almost dead). Apparently, they have two different number systems, and mathematicians are interested in what's different in the concepts of the two, and what it may be able to teach them.

  • Perligata (Score:4, Interesting)

    by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdeversNO@SPAMcis.usouthal.edu> on Tuesday May 11, 2004 @04:32PM (#9120269) Homepage Journal

    How does Latin Perl [monash.edu.au] sound to you?

    The Sieve of Eratosthenes is one of oldest well-known algorithms. As the better part of Roman culture was ``borrowed'' from the Greeks, it is perhaps fitting that the first ever Perligata program should be as well:

    #! /usr/local/bin/perl -w
    use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;
    maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.
    meo maximo vestibulo perlegamentum da.
    da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
    dum listis decapitamentum damentum nexto
    fac sic
    nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
    lista sic hoc recidementum nextum cis vannementa da listis.
    cis.

    The use Lingua::Romana::Perligata statement causes the remainder of the program to be translated into the following Perl:

    print STDOUT 'maximum:';
    my $maxim = <STDIN>;
    my (@list) = (2..$maxim);
    while ($next = shift @list)
    {
    print STDOUT $next, "\n";
    @list = grep {$_ % $next} @list;
    }

    Note in the very last Perligata statement (lista sic hoc...da listis) that the use of inflexion distinguishes the @list that is grep'ed (lista) from the @list that is assigned to (listis), even though each is at the "wrong'' end of the statement, compared with the Perl version.

    And you too can do this ! [cpan.org]

    Actually, Perligata is more serious than it may seem.

    On one level, it uses Latin -- which packs much of the meaning of sentences into word endings rather than word order -- as a case study for a programming language that doesn't enforce a particular mandatory word order on language statements. That is, in English, "boy chases dog" has a much different meaning than "dog chases boy", but in Latin you could write it either way because the inflection on the words controls the meaning. Likewise, in most programming languages, x = y has a different meaning than y = x, but if you had a language that was agnostic about "sentence order" then you could write it either way. Using Latin allowed him to demonstrate this in practice.

    Why would anyone care? Well, when Perligata was written, Perl6 was just starting to be considered, and Damian was wondering what core concepts had to be maintained and which were open to revision. Among the assumptions he wanted to consider was word order, and Perligata is a case study in how you can throw it out the window without breaking anything.

    Coming down to Earth, this technique could have other applications as well. For example, the techniques used in Perligata could be applied in a source filter to convert VBScript to Perl [mail-archive.com] at run time. There are issues to consider [mail-archive.com], of course, but it could work, if you wanted it badly enough. To cite a real example, one of the core plans for Perl6 is that it should be able to run existing Perl5 code, and the techniques demonstrated in Perligata will probably be used to make that possible.

    Likewise, the object framework for Perl 6 [perl.com] is very flexible, allowing people to hand-roll almost any style of OO programming they are comfortable with. If you pair this with things like the built in Unicode support (and, allegedly, no obstacles to using Unicode symbols directly in Perl6 code for things like variables, functions, overridden operators, etc), there's no reason why people couldn't prepare "localized" versions of Perl6. It'll be interesting to see if this ends up happening, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if

  • My favorite is Unlambda, which is entirely independent of natural language facticity:
    Clickez ici. [eleves.ens.fr] It's based on S,K,I combinators and "abstraction elimination."
  • #define is your friend.
  • OK, check this out: Ampere WS1 [old-computers.com].

    An APL laptop from the bizarro world. I have just spent as many as several minutes on Google trying to find some evidence that this weird thing I vaguely remembered from the distant past actually exists. I've seen one, even tried to use it. Didn't get anywhere. I'm gonna chase that puppy up and learn me some APL. Oh yeah. Welcome to so many wasted weekends and sleepless nights. Happy days.

  • Owing to growing up in Wales (that's the bit sticking out to the left of England, for Americans; and certainly not 'Wales, England'), I did my first Computer Studies courses there in the late 70s/early 80s. Around that time there was a very strong push for equality of Welsh and English, so much so that a Welsh version of BASIC, called BASEG was produced. Sadly, the passage of time seems to have wiped it from the web (though a Google Groups search [google.com] for 'welsh basic programming' throws up some references).

    W

  • I have a vague recollection of french versions of Basic (or was it Logo) when I was young (around 1985).
    Those were extremely annoying to code with, since you had to guess what could be the translation for "gosub" or "on error resume next". (or nag the owner/school for a basic manual they usually didn't know existed.)

    It's weird though. Nowadays, programmers compete for jobs on a global scale. It seems backward to start using localized programming languages usable only by a small fraction of the global workf
  • Anybody who has read the Revised Report on Algol 68
    knows that the language as defined there consists of the
    set of production trees of the grammar of the language.

    Each production tree needs to be represented in a
    representation language, which is the form we usually
    seen when we think about programming languages.
    However, back then machines had such wildly differing
    wordsizes and character sets that this distinction was
    necessary. After publication of the Revised Report, with its
    included representation meant pub

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