In the early 90's - ie before the internet cemented the hegemony of English in s/w development - some colleagues worked on a codebase that was an international

In the early 90's - ie before the internet cemented the hegemony of English in s/w development - some colleagues worked on a codebase that was an international collaboration between the UK, Germany and France. Each nation used their own native language identifiers for variables and functions, and there was a custom preprocessor to translate between them. The feeling was very much that this was political far more than an aid to the programmers, although of course that was the English-speakers perspective! But it did make working with the code (which was a mess anyway) far more complicated.