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A technical problem with localising a programming language is reserved words: either you decide in advance which localised variants will exist and you can't add
by bloak 7y ago
A technical problem with localising a programming language is reserved words: either you decide in advance which localised variants will exist and you can't add any later, or the variants are potentially incompatible and to combine code written for different variants you would need to do some translation that involves changing identifiers, and I can't immediately imagine how that would work with libraries and so on.
Alternatively, you pick a programming language that doesn't have any reserved words, such as FORTRAN. (Are there any other well known ones?)
- Someone 7y agoPL/I. The argument there was that one cannot assume anybody to remember all the keywords (over 300 in some implementations. See https://www.cs.vu.nl/grammarware/browsable/os-pli-v2r3/ https://www.cs.vu.nl/grammarware/browsable/os-pli-v2r3/), so they weren’t any reserved words, allowing, for example IF IF = ELSE THEN IF = ELSE - 1; ELSE ELSE = IF + 1; Writing a compiler for that must be fun, especially if one wants to produce useful error messages.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoOn of the reasons that PL/1 didn't take of I believe, a pity as it was very advanced (for its time) and nice to work with.