Multilingualism at programmer level (Was: slate unicode support)

[Glenn Alexander]

On Fri, 30 Jul 2004 22:01, Lendvai Attila wrote: 
> at a certain point in the future, this issue will be much 
> different. source will be just another object graph, and an 
> editor will work on that object graph instead of plain text 
> (i.e. no parsing, or in a quite different way). 
 
Query: So, in theory, a programmer with absolutely no English would 
then be able to program using keywords in their own language and it 
likely wouldn't be too hard to have an editor that auto-translates 
other's code in a foreign language to meaningful words in whatever 
local language, so that programmer could look into others' code even 
if it is not in their native language???? (I imagine such a system 
would provide comprehensible, rather than fluent translation, like 
human language auto-translation systems, but programmatic code doesn't 
read exactly like a natural language anyway). 
 
eg: if I call a local variable in my code 'white_dog', a Chinese 
programmer's editor could show it as 'bai_gou' either in pinyin or 
characters, the idea being that meaningful variable/object/function 
names are carried through to other languages transparently. 
 
This, if I got the idea right, represents a VERY useful thing ffrom my 
perspective, as my interest in Slate is its use in the primary 
classroom, not necessarily in an English language setting. 
 
> at that point names will be only used for humans, you could 
> even remove all names from the code as a simple and effective 
> ofuscation, and it would still run just like before. 
 
Query: So the built-in slate standard objects could be tokenised, and 
a local language back-translates those tokens to whatever human 
language the user wishes to program in?? 
 
Is this sort of thing what might be possible *in the long term*? Has 
anyone ever done something like this before? 
 
> so I don't think we should concentrate on parsing too much, 
> just simply avoid chinese until there's an editor mentioned 
> above. 
 
Hard to avoid Chinese when I live in the midst of 1.3 billion of 
them ;-). But, yes, if I unserstand the intent of the above, focusing 
on the described object graph editor would definitely be the way to 
go. 
 
(I'm a hardware tech, not a programmer, so excuse me if my ideas and 
understandings are a bit sloppy. Also, I'm not suggesting this as an 
immediate focus. I would not be seriously thinking about putting 
resources into that sort of internationalisation until after 1.0. I'm 
just interested if this is possible/worthwhile.) 
 
Regards, 
Glenn 
-------------------------------------------------------- 
Glenn Alexander 
(B.Teach, B.Ed Major IT Education, University of Wollongong Australia) 
Home site: http://www.shoalhaven.net.au/~glenalec 
Jabber:    glenalec @ jabber.org 
 
I use GNU/Linux: http://www.gnu.org / http://www.linux.org 
from Debian: http://www.debian.org 
-------------------------------------------------------- 
 Fight software piracy. Use GNU! [ http://www.gnu.org ] 
--------------------------------------------------------