connors@druco.ATT.COM (ConnorsPA) (06/13/90)
Some of us were sitting around here in one of our rare idle moments, and we got to thinking. Here all we see are thousands and thousands of programs written in ENGLISH. But there are many other countries around the world, and many nationalities. What do programs look like in other languages? Are the keywords still in English, with the comments in the native language? Or does everything look different? It would be very interesting to see some short samples of code in other languages. ----------------------------- Paul Connors Email: att!druco!connors -----------------------------
abrodnik@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Andrej Brodnik (Andy)) (06/13/90)
In article <4896@druco.ATT.COM> connors@druco.ATT.COM (ConnorsPA) writes: > > What do programs look like in other languages? > Are the keywords still in English, with the comments > in the native language? Or does everything look different? > Hi, my mother's tongue is Slovene and from my experience I have to say that programmes written by Slovenes are more or less a kind of mixture of English reserved words (begin, end, ...), and Slovene comments and names of variables or procedures etc. For example let me write a short programme in English and in Slovene: PROGRAM Something; VAR counter: integer; BEGIN FOR counter:= 0 TO 10 DO WriteLn ('Hi there!'); END; (* Something *) PROGRAM Nekaj; VAR stevec: integer; BEGIN FOR stevec:= 0 TO 10 DO WriteLn ('@ivijo !'); END; (* Nekaj *) Here you can note one problem. In Slovene alphabet we have some letters which do not exist in English one. Therefore, according to ISO standard, we use ASCII codes of "^[@~{`" for them (and they appear on our terminals/printers in v their Slovene shape). For example "@" would appear something like "Z" (only its height is the same as any other's letter. But in common compilers these characters are reserved for special purpose opeartors and therefore they can not appear in variables/procedures names. In v fact "stevec" should be written as "stevec", but in strings to be printed out you can freely use the Slovene characters. To conclude, the programmes have English reserved words, Slovene variable/procedure names (not completley written in Slovene alphabet) and completley Slovene strings. I hope that this answeres your question, but if you have any further questions do not hesitate to ask. I can tell you even how the programmes look like written using a Russian alphabet. For all "not-Cyrilic" people they could be realy strange, but more or less everything depends and is defined through the definition of Ord(char) function. Regards Andrej
diamond@tkou02.enet.dec.com (diamond@tkovoa) (06/14/90)
In article <4896@druco.ATT.COM> connors@druco.ATT.COM (ConnorsPA) writes: > What do programs look like in other languages? > Are the keywords still in English, with the comments > in the native language? Usually. ISO standards usually specify the language syntax but not the contents of comments. Programs are usually portable from one country to another. I have seen one exception. In C for System V (or at least some variants), identifiers can use non-Roman characters. It's a bit tough to remember that some of those kanji are variable names and not comments. -- Norman Diamond, Nihon DEC diamond@tkou02.enet.dec.com Proposed group comp.networks.load-reduction: send your "yes" vote to /dev/null.
jensting@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Jens Tingleff) (06/14/90)
connors@druco.ATT.COM (ConnorsPA) writes: [..] > What do programs look like in other languages? > Are the keywords still in English, with the comments > in the native language? Or does everything look different? I've noted from German computer-hobbyist magazines (hey, let's design a 68020 based computer..) that a lot of these germans *like* their programs in german. Most of them make do with keeping all the identifiers in german, plus comments. Some code in English entirely. (As a digression, I code in English, but I have `international amibitions'.) I have even seen an ad for a Pascal compiler that allowed you to switch keywords, so that you could have german language keywords in Pascal. *VERY WEIRD*, IMHO. In Denmark, I've seen a lot of programmers in acedemical environments code in danish, and a lot of people code in English. I don't think there is a general trend, at least not in the countries I've seen sample code from (Denmark, Germany,..) Jens jensting@diku.dk is Jens Tingleff MSc EE, Research Assistent at DIKU Institute of Computer Science, Copenhagen University Snail mail: DIKU Universitetsparken 1 DK2100 KBH O
sergio@squid.rtech.com (Sergio Aponte) (06/15/90)
>In article <4896@druco.ATT.COM> connors@druco.ATT.COM (ConnorsPA) writes: > >> What do programs look like in other languages? >> Are the keywords still in English, with the comments >> in the native language? > I received some scripts and configuration files from Germany for an Apollo, and even when they wre in csh, the use of variable names in german, or node names for the NET in german made them very hard to read. Comments were in german two, so it was very hard to decifer what was done at many points of the script. Found them very interesting, do... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Internet: sergio@squid.ingres.com Sergio L. Aponte, MTS @ Ingres Corp. | | UUCP : {sun,mtxinu,pyramid,pacbell,hoptoad,amdahl}!ingres!squid!sergio | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ck@voa3.UUCP (Chris Kern) (06/15/90)
Fellow at Xerox hacked their Mesa compiler a couple of years ago to accommodate multilingual (i.e., several languages simultaneously, not just a single language other than English) source programs. Compiler keywords were still in English, but module names, identifiers, string literals and comments could be in any language or combination of languages. So, for example, you could use Chinese characters for constants, put your variable names in Russian, and document your program with Arabic comments (reading from right to left, of course), perhaps containing German parentheticals (reading from left to right). The source code could include different font styles (e.g., italics) and even graphics (e.g., to diagram data structures). -- Chris Kern Voice of America, Washington, D.C. ...uunet!voa3!ck +1 202-619-2020
major@pyrmania.oz (Major) (06/15/90)
connors@druco.ATT.COM (ConnorsPA) writes: > What do programs look like in other languages? > Are the keywords still in English, with the comments > in the native language? Or does everything look different? Some years ago, I went to a seminar given by someone from the USSR accademy of sciences. He said that they wrote their own compilers which took russian keywords. He said the FORTRAN compiler was easy because there were few keywords and the result was not expected to be directly readable. COBOL was more difficult as the result was supposed to end up looking like Russian (not english) sentences. ---- Happy Hacking! | US immigration official to little old lady: Do you Major | support the overthrow of the government by violence | or subversion? Lady: (long pause) Violence I think
karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) (06/17/90)
In article <5454@rtech.Ingres.COM> sergio@squid.UUCP (Sergio Aponte) writes: >I received some scripts and configuration files from Germany ... >Comments were in german two, ... German Two? Would that be the new ANSI Standard German? I didn't think it had been approved yet, but maybe this was based on a Draft copy. In the first public review, I submitted a proposal to eliminate noun genders, but the Committee insisted on retaining them for backward compatibility with German One, and occasionally to disambiguate (das Messer vs. der Messer). Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl@kelp.ima.isc.com or harvard!ima!karl), The Walking Lint :-)