Re: Wasteful internationalization



Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

"Alex R. Mosteo" <devnull@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:51rhs3F1m1jliU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Randy Brukardt wrote:
...
It's difficult not to agree with the compiler example. Compiler errors are
certainly bothersome for me in Spanish, but because they're badly
translated and they difficult searches in google. An even worse example is
Excel, whose formulae are translated in Spanish versions! So you have
both "IF(;;)" and "SI(;;)" and so on, and both are accepted by the formula
engine. This is just mental.

This gave me a vision of a fully internationalized Ada program written in
Cyrillic (or Chinese or Thai or ...). Just a mass of funny looking
characters. Just imagine the portability!

I must object to the characterization of non-English characters as
"funny".

To people who grew up with Chinese as their native tongue, this entire
thread is just a stream of "funny characters", and a compiler that
worked with Chinese as nicely as GNAT does with English would be a
very productive tool.

Identifiers in Ada are actually Latin-1, arent't they? At least in
GNAT writing 'Überschuss' instead of 'Ueberschuss' works. And I
appreciate that. So, a compiler taking complete unicode source with
identifiers in the respective alphabets would be really useful.



While I believe it is true that English is spoken by more people
than any other language (if we count people for whom English is a
second language),

Hm. I'd even be tempted to deny this.

there are still billions of people who do not
speak English. We should not dismiss them so lightly.

ACK.

Regards -- Markus
.

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