Re: Avatox 1.0: Trouble with encoding in Windows

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:

> I'm sure no one will agree with me, but I don't see the value of 
> allowing characters outside 'a' .. 'z' & 'A' .. 'Z' in Ada identifiers. 

One value of characters outside the "crippled" range for English
is communication which relates to the problem domain, and specifically
adresses those who have to solve it.
The problem might have its own language, as Martin explains.
In particular, not every program is written by an international
team. Even if it is written in a common language, the common
language is only _like_ English, it is rather some computese. At
least I get this impression when I look at some programs and texts
including my own...

Mixing languages in every day talk has been very common for a long
time before English took over as the lingua franca of the Western
World. Martin Luther and friends used a mix of Latin and German
in speech but not when writing.



> Ada is designed to read like English, so in most cases identifiers 
> should be in English.

But words of grammar are as formal as the symbols in the grammar.
Other formal languages in the Ada camp even use artificial words
like "fi" and "od". I think the argument that Ada's grammar implies
English does not apply even though some of its reserved words
are English (like "then"). "Procedure" and "function" are not
specifically English, I'd say. If Ada is designed to read *like* English,
then we have to consider that the European languages are very much
*like* each other (communication barriers notwithstanding).
For example, "when" reads "wenn", "then" reads "dann" (or even "denn"),
and so on, in German. I'm sure people from other countries west of
the slavic borders can add similar comparisons.

So using your native language or problem domain language might add
value to the local mode of expression.

The word "resent" is an example of the effects of people trying
to write Enlish when they probably shouldn't. "Resent" is to be
understood as a passive form of the word "resend". This word doesn't
exist in my fairly recent edition of an Oxford dictionary.  But it has
been added to a popular online dictionary (dict.leo.org).
Nevertheless, I bet few people know that "resent" means something
very different when English isn't their native language.
(But it reads like English...)

I hope I didn't make too many language related mistakes in this
post.



-- Georg