OT: Programmers whos first language is not English

[laotseu]

Stephen Horne wrote:
> I'm thinking of creating my own programming language (again - but
> taking it more seriously, though the odds of it ever competing with
> Python are pretty close to zero).
> 
> One thing I'm considering is the use of a non-ASCII source code.
> 
> In particular, I'm thinking of using XML - not as an AST
> representation, but merely as a way of marking up source code. This
> would require special editors, of course, but if WYSIWYG editors can
> be created for HTML I don't see why programmers are still stuck in the
> plaintext age.

I must be kind of an antique reptilian, but I do like being stuck un the 
plaintext age...

> One possible use of XML might be that 'keywords' and 'symbols' could
> be stored as XML elements specifying non-language-specific tokens -
> the editor could have a local language table to recognise keywords as
> the programmer types (or could use hotkeys to insert whole keywords
> Speccy-style) and could present them on screen with colour
> highlighting. This would require little (if any) more work than
> existing syntax-highlighting editors.
> 
> I'm quite curious what other people think about this kind of idea -
> particularly people whose first language is not English.

If you really care about it :

Down here in France, we have a (BTW very bad and buggy, but that's 
another point) so-called 4gl named Windev, which keywords and function 
names are in french. This looks like :

idfichier = fouvre("monfichier", FO_LECTURE)
SI idfichier = -1 ALORS
     alerte("Impossible d'ouvrir le fichier monfichier en lecture")
     renvoyer FAUX
SINON
     tampon = flitLigne(idfichier)
     TANTQUE tampon <> EOT // this one has not been translated
         // do something with it
         //
         tampon = flitligne(idfichier)
     FIN
     fFerme(idfichier)
     idfichier = -1
FIN

Yuck ! I just *hate* this.

French is not my programming language. I use english for all my 
identifiers, function names, class names etc, and comments, even for 
personnal, never-to-be-released code.

Laotseu
english-like-programming-languages-intoxicated-programmer