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: 103376,699cc914522aa7c4 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news2.google.com!news3.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!tiscali!newsfeed1.ip.tiscali.net!news.tele.dk!news.tele.dk!small.news.tele.dk!newspeer2.se.telia.net!se.telia.net!masternews.telia.net.!newsb.telia.net.POSTED!not-for-mail From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Bj=F6rn?= Persson Subject: Re: Wasteful internationalization Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <_wrvh.30646$E02.12547@newsb.telia.net> User-Agent: KNode/0.10.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit Message-ID: Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2007 01:55:32 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 83.250.96.174 X-Complaints-To: abuse@telia.com X-Trace: newsb.telia.net 1170813332 83.250.96.174 (Wed, 07 Feb 2007 02:55:32 CET) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2007 02:55:32 CET Organization: Telia Internet Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:9042 Date: 2007-02-07T01:55:32+00:00 List-Id: Markus E Leypold wrote: > "Randy Brukardt" writes: > >> Anyway, the discussion point was the readability and portability of Ada >> sources. I thought the discussion point was whether it's OK to occasionally include a non-ASCII character in an otherwise English-language Usenet post. >> You can probably get by ignoring the exact content of strings, >> but that's impossible with identifiers. So a program with Chinese >> identifiers is going to be unreadable to someone outside of China. Conversely, a program with English identifiers and comments may not be so easy to read to someone *in* China. Many people over there are rather bad at English. A Chinese programmer team at a Chinese company on the Chinese market may well choose to write in Chinese because it makes the code more readable and maintainable *to them*. And as Markus demonstrates below, if they'd try to write in English the code might end up illegible to you anyway: > A small number > of comments were in english which became more understandable after > translating it into german word for word (i.e. w/o looking at the > possible meaning, just use "Speicher-Loch" for " memory hole" (which > should have been "memory leak") etc. The identifiers were just > nonsense or bad english too. See? Their attempt to write in English didn't help much. This isn't a matter of character encodings at all; it's a matter of knowledge of languages. And once again: There's a big difference between a Chinese text and a well-known mathematical symbol which just happens to be a Greek letter. -- Bj�rn Persson PGP key A88682FD omb jor ers @sv ge. r o.b n.p son eri nu