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 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Wasteful internationalization References: <_wrvh.30646$E02.12547@newsb.telia.net> From: Markus E Leypold Organization: N/A Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:20:10 +0100 Message-ID: User-Agent: Some cool user agent (SCUG) Cancel-Lock: sha1:mx1GkYtoR2uzJxxaU3afIWfBpHs= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 88.72.224.62 X-Trace: news.arcor-ip.de 1170814503 88.72.224.62 (7 Feb 2007 03:15:03 +0200) X-Complaints-To: abuse@arcor-ip.de Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!news1.google.com!news3.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!newsfeed01.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!newsfeed.arcor-ip.de!news.arcor-ip.de!not-for-mail Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:9108 Date: 2007-02-07T03:20:10+01:00 List-Id: Bj�rn Persson writes: > 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. Not really. We started out (approximately) wether it should be considered a good thing that Ada sourcec can / will be able to be full unicode and what evil would come from writing identifiers in all unicode characters. Or something like this. >>> 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: Yes. But that anekdote was not contributed to support your case :-), and also it refers to comments especially. I know a number of cases of absolutely incomprehensible docs by native speakers. Documentation is more than just language. And while you're at learning it you can as well learn the "universal" tech pidgin which happens to be dreived from English. ( Actually: The occurrence of pidgin languages somwhat indicates to me, that the trend of cultures trading with others is usually more to develop some common / intermediate language and not translate everything. Much less work, since anyone has to learn the common language just once. And it delights me that the "natural order of things" enrages "linguistic" purists like the VDS-EV -- a society which tries to rescue German from the English influence. ) >> 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 Curiously enough it was probably better understandable to me (a German) than to some english native speaker. The anekdote has only entertainment value. To comclude something from it would premature. > a matter of character encodings at all; it's a matter of knowledge > of languages. So why do you feel so strongly on encodings? At least German can well be transcribed into 7-Bit ASCII and I hardly ever write German on the net. > 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. If we start to support display mathematics in news readers we can as well go the whole way and support a good layout system (like that TeX has). Unfortunately the editors (with the possible ecxeption of TeXmacs are not up to the task. So if I can't write/display proper math at all, what does the support of an occasional greek letter for math buy me? Has Lars to stop reading mail with his VT102 only because some people sometimes want to stray in the occasional greek character and therefore we all switch to full UTF-8 and Mime and so on? Just playing (being?) advocatus diablo -- Markus