Non-English Programming Languages?

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?"

Comments

Google

[marco0009]

Thank you google for your infinite wisdom:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/encyclopedia/non_engli sh_based_programming_languages

Re:Google

[Profane MuthaFucka]

proper link

Many of them...

[addaon]

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.

What do you want, universe?

[Michael.Forman]

Klingon Var'aq.

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.

None English programming languages?

[LWATCDR]

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?

[LocoBurger]

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? :)

Re:None English programming languages?

[Otter]

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.

Re:None English programming languages?

[raju1kabir]

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.

Duh. Anyone knows that a C followed by a + in French takes on a hard sound unless mollified by a cedilla. Je suis sic+ et tired de votre nonsense.

Not too difficult...

[BobTheJanitor]

With a bit of Lex and Yacc, 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. 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++.

Bad Idea

[Captain Rotundo]

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:Translated Visual Basic

[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.

Perl ...

[Tux2000]

... completely without letters if you do it right! ;-)

C ?

[noselasd]

"#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;
}

Re:When you mention lisp

[notfancy]

CAR (Contents of Address Register) and CDR (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 is also Latin for "CONStruo".

Re:Swedish Chef BASIC - optimized!

[RevAaron]

Except, that illustrates the problem precisely. If it truly were Swedish chef, the words "PRINT" and "GOTO" would be in their Swedish equvalents. And since I don't speak Swedish, I'll approximate:

10 DRUCKENJORGESPORGE "BORK!"
20 GEHENJASUREj00BECHA 10

Programming in a Mother Tongue

[Mike Wilson]

If I remember correctly, Mitarou Namiki 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 and his lab's website.

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.

Perligata

[babbage]

How does Latin Perl 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 !

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 at run time. There are issues to consider, 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 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