Re: OPES Rules Language

On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, Alex Rousskov wrote:
>
> I doubt this group has enough energy and motivation to support the former;
> P/Sieve programmers will most likely have to use English keywords. Said
> that, it would be a trivial task (from technical point of view) to provide
> alternative keyword codings so that non-english programmers feel more
> confortable. For some reason, popular programming language standards do not
> offer that kind of flexibility (AFAIK).

Natural language translations of programming language keywords are
generally a bad idea. It bloats the programming language specification and
reduces the ability of programmers from different countries to understand
each others' work. It's better to treat programming languages like
mathematical notation, with a formal intrinsic meaning which is only
suggested by the choice of keyword. Programmers are used to this, so it
isn't a problem.

The question of names defined by programmers (as opposed to keywords
defined by the language specification) is much simpler. If the language
source character set is specified to be unicode, then programmers can
use whatever natural language they like when choosing names. This is
standard practice these days.

Tony.
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