Re: Must programming languages be English ?

[Tim Hill <drtimhill@...>]

It would be interesting to see how far they got with this bureaucratic madness:

Musical scores use annotations (translation: keywords) typically in italian (Con Brio, Allegro etc.). Are these too to be translated? What about french terms in recipes? Saute? What about ballet terms?

In fact, imho we are drifting radially toward english being the de facto world technical language. No-one in India or China would dream of entering into computer programming without being able to read English (been there, talked to them). Yes, they are not necessarily happy TALKING in English, but they can read it pretty well.

Don't know if this is good or bad, it's always sad when a culture becomes too homogeneous.

--Tim

On Apr 12, 2013, at 1:59 PM, marbux <marbux@gmail.com> wrote:

The "unnecessary" adjective in the "unnecessary obstacles to
international trade" phrase then becomes the key to unlocking the
legal puzzle, i.e., is the obstacle created by dependence on a
particular human language unavoidable , or in the language of the
treaty, is it the least "trade-restrictive manner" to fulfill the
programming language's raison d'être?

And that in turn boils down to the question of whether it is
technically possible to design the programming language such that the
particular human language dependency is unnecessary?