From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,a82f86f344c98f79 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news1.google.com!news4.google.com!news.glorb.com!newsfeed0.kamp.net!newsfeed.kamp.net!newsfeed.freenet.de!newsfeed01.chello.at!newsfeed.arcor.de!newsspool2.arcor-online.net!news.arcor.de.POSTED!not-for-mail Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:41:47 +0200 From: Georg Bauhaus Organization: elsewhere User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 (Macintosh/20060719) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Avatox 1.0: Trouble with encoding in Windows References: <45051d37@news.upm.es> <45053aec$0$5142$9b4e6d93@newsspool1.arcor-online.net> <5ZednRK-0M3K15rYnZ2dnUVZ_o2dnZ2d@megapath.net> <1158145462.921837.152720@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> <1158224191.059815.103080@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <450a74ae$0$17404$9b4e6d93@newsspool2.arcor-online.net> NNTP-Posting-Date: 15 Sep 2006 11:38:55 CEST NNTP-Posting-Host: 35bc6ea1.newsspool2.arcor-online.net X-Trace: DXC=o5bnF2Q42_dFXUDVUnEXQmA9EHlD;3Ycb4Fo<]lROoRa4nDHegD_]ReKU0SgQ`8f2oA:ho7QcPOVc]:T8F@RoX:jZo_C\J?WNZg X-Complaints-To: usenet-abuse@arcor.de Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:6590 Date: 2006-09-15T11:38:55+02:00 List-Id: 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