Ada keywords (was: Re: newbie can't get exceptions to work!)

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

I understand why the official standard for Ada wouldn't allow keywords to be
translated to other languages - obvious possible problems with collisions of
keywords with identifiers & all the validation problems that would ensue.
However why would it be a problem for some company - say in France - that
wanted to use Ada (and had no porting issues) to go ahead and define their
own language. Call it "La Ada" or something else. It would be simple to
write a preprocessor that would translate French keywords into the
corresponding English keywords and so long as you never used the English
keywords for identifiers, it should pass straight into a standard Ada
compiler. Problem solved? (Aside from the fact that I generally dislike
preprocessors - this one at least wouldn't be much of an intrusion into
normal life since it doesn't change anything semantically.)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Robert A Duff" <bobduff@world.std.com> wrote in message
news:wcc7l0t5wq1.fsf@world.std.com...
> Umm, surely Ada keywords are in English because the design of Ada was
> done for the United States Department of Defense, which tends to use
> English (or at least a dialect of it).  It doesn't mean English is
> "better" than anything else.
>
> If I design a programming language, the keywords will be in English,
> because that's all I know (unfortunately).
>
> The original designer of Ada spoke French as his first language.
>
> - Bob