Re: Echte Lokaliserung der Programmbausprache/ Real Localisation of Programming Language

[Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM>]

Rüdiger Müller wrote on 06 October 2008 17:55:

[ proposal to localize keywords: replace if/else/return etc with
  equivalents from the local language ]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 06:42:17PM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
>   God no.  Think of the maintenance nightmare.

I guess it's easy for native English speakers like Dave and me to object
(and be thankful that we didn't live 80 years ago, when the leading
physics and engineering journals were in German).  Still, Dave's right.

A reserved word is in essence a symbol, even if it takes the form of
a word from a particular language.  Now that we have Unicode, I suppose
one could come up with programming languages that use
spoken-language-neutral symbols in place of reserved words.  C already
does this to some extent: { and } instead of "begin" and "end", && and
|| instead of "and" and "or".  That would be preferable to making
every equivalent word in every language a keyword, or requiring the
setting of a "programmer spoken language" variable that would have to
be set correctly to compile a program.

Determined users are still free to write

#define falls if

and the like, though I would have thought "wenn" would be more correct in
conveying the sense in which "if" is used in C (though my German is very
limited).  Unfortunately, #define itself can't be replaced.