RE: Wasteful internationalization

[I'm trying to use the Ada-France comp.lang.ada scheme, as I'm using a new
Internet provider without a news server (or at least they won't tell me
where one is. So I've missed a couple of days messages, hopefully I'm not
repeating stuff.]

Björn Persson writes (mostly responding to me):

Markus E Leypold wrote:

"Randy Brukardt" <randy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Anyway, the discussion point was the readability and portability of Ada
sources.

I thought the discussion point was whether it's OK to occasionally include
a
non-ASCII character in an otherwise English-language Usenet post.

I hope you're kidding. That side discussion erupted over examples of the
readability of Ada sources.

You can probably get by ignoring the exact content of strings,
but that's impossible with identifiers. So a program with Chinese
identifiers is going to be unreadable to someone outside of China.

Conversely, a program with English identifiers and comments may not be so
easy to read to someone *in* China. Many people over there are rather bad
at English. A Chinese programmer team at a Chinese company on the Chinese
market may well choose to write in Chinese because it makes the code more
readable and maintainable *to them*.

That's fine if they never want any help. If they post a question here with
that program, the odds are that they won't get many, if any answers. Most of
us will see nothing except a bunch of boxes. (Indeed, if you're using the
e-mail version of cla, and have a decent spam filter, you'll never see the
thread in the first place.)

Similarly, if someone was to ask for help with Janus/Ada and sent such a
program, I wouldn't be able to do anything for them. That's not good for
either us (it does not allow us to provide support up to the level of our
standard) nor for the customer.

The point is that if you want to be part of the Ada *Community*, you have to
use characters that the vast majority of the Community can understand. If
you don't care or expect any help or sharing, then it doesn't matter.

A number of us were very strongly opposed to the PI thing, simply because it
suggests that program abuse of this type is OK.

And as Markus demonstrates below, if
they'd try to write in English the code might end up illegible to you
anyway:

A small number
of comments were in english which became more understandable after
translating it into german word for word (i.e. w/o looking at the
possible meaning, just use "Speicher-Loch" for " memory hole" (which
should have been "memory leak") etc. The identifiers were just
nonsense or bad english too.

See? Their attempt to write in English didn't help much. This isn't a
matter
of character encodings at all; it's a matter of knowledge of languages.

Not relevant. I've had to provide technical support for programs with
foreign language comments. It's not fun, but it is possible because you can
just follow the identifiers. You can't do that if the ids are just blocks of
square boxes -- they'll all look the same.

And once again: There's a big difference between a Chinese text and a
well-known mathematical symbol which just happens to be a Greek letter.

And that's irrelevant to the primary thread (which is programs written
primarily in non-Latin-1 fonts). I personally don't mind program texts that
stick to the roughly 600 characters that are available in most Windows
fonts. But other people's systems may vary as to what is available. And I
don't want to encourage use of characters that can't be displayed by most.
So a "single Greek character" is an example of the slippery slope to
obblivion: people are not going to stop there.

Randy.

.

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