Python, Dutch, English, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

[Ross Ridge]

Ross Ridge wrote:
> Translating keywords and standard identifiers into Chinese could make
> learning Python even more difficult.  It would probably make things
> easier for new programmers, but I don't know if serious programmers would
> actually prefer programming using Chinese keywords.  It would make their
> Python implementations incompatible with the standard implementation, they
> wouldn't be able to use third-party modules and their own code wouldn't
> be portable.  If novice Chinese programmers would have to unlearn much
> of they've learned in order to become serious Python programmers are
> you really doing them a favour by teaching them Chinese Python?
>
> It would really only work if Chinese Python became it own successful
> dialect of Python, independent of the standard Python implementation.
> Chinese Python programmers would be isolated from other Python
> programmers, each with their own set of third-party modules and little
> code sharing between the two groups.  I don't think this would be good
> for Python as whole.
   
Wildemar Wildenburger  <wildemar at freakmail.de> wrote:
>I don't see the problem here. The bytecode wouldn't change (right?).

Python code generally isn't shared as bytecode and it's not just keywords
we're talking about here, all standard Python identifiers (eg. "os" and
"sys") would be translated too.

>So what? One would have to make sure that the interprter understands both 
>(or to generalize: all) language versions of python and wham!

That might work, you'd need both the standard and Chinese versions the
Python standard libraries.  I doubt anyone outside of China would want
a distribution that included both, so there would still be barriers to
code sharing between the two communities.

Interestingly, someone has already created a Chinese version of Python
much like Steve Howell suggested:

	http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/home.html
	http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english.html

Apparently it hasn't been updated in almost four years, so I don't know
much use it gets.

					Ross Ridge

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