Re: case-sensitivity

bh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Brian Harvey) writes:

How many people participating in this thread have ever actually tried to read
a computer program written by a native speaker of a different natural
language? Over in comp.lang.logo we have a very active software developer
whose native language is Spanish, and his procedure names are in Spanish.

Let me tell you, orthography (case, accents, whatever) is the least of the
difficulty I have in reading his code! *I don't speak the language!*
Someone in this thread proposed using numeric identifiers as a straw-man
counterexample to something -- well, for me, this guy might as well be using
numeric identifiers, for all the mnemonic value his names have. *He* can
read *my* code, because he speaks English.

But I don't understand. If English is 40% Latin, and 20% French which
is itself 70% Latin, and if Spanish is itself 70% Latin too, why don't
you understand Spanish words?



So I don't see much hope, or any need, for a general resolution of folding
issues. It seems to me that what's needed is a mechanism for local plugin
of a folding module written by and for native speakers of each language.
That's the general principle that designers should design around.

Well, perhaps for lisp there's a little hope in that, but some have
done localized basics or localized pascals and I assure you, it's not
pretty.


And in *that* context I feel perfectly entitled to ask for case folding
in North American English, without feeling guiltily cultural imperialist.

Now for the part that is, sadly, cultural imperialist: For the foreseeable
future, internationally cooperative programming is going to be done in
English, I predict. So, as a pragmatic matter, it is probably more
important for the Chinese dialect of Scheme (or whatever) to be able to do
English folding correctly than for the American dialect to be able to do
Chinese folding correctly. I'm not saying this is how the world should be.

P.S. Oh well, if George Bush has his way, pretty soon it'll be illegal to
speak anything but English (makes things too hard for the NSA) anywhere on
Earth, and then we can go back to ASCII. A silver lining in every cloud.

:-)


--
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