Another thing to consider is that Perl 6 is symbol-heavy: that is, keywords are often symbols (such as &&, <=>, or $_) rather than words. AFAIK, those symbols are not English, and I would not expect them to change under a natural language transformation of the setting. And to elaborate on Aaron's point, I'd expect such things as function call syntax, operator syntax, method call syntax, and the like to remain the same, as these things aren't English either.
As for seeing a "natural language variant" of Perl, my own thought is that the first such variant might be most useful if it mines a decidedly artificial "natural language" for its keywords, such as Esperanto or Interlingua. Given that Perl is not English, and merely uses English loan words whenever it needs alphanumeric keywords, I suspect that an Interlingua-based variant might be close enough to, say, a Spanish- or French-based variant that the latter two might possibly end up not being worth the trouble of writing. Not being a linguist, I could be wrong about any or all of the above. As for Aaron's concerns about the use of alternate natural languages complicating the use of modules: note that this really isn't any different from any case where you change the underlying grammar. Perl has a robust module system that assumes that each module is written in the Perl dialect that the module specifies rather than in the dialect that the script is written in, and vice versa; so aside from the optional hassle of translating English-based modules into the preferred natural language setting when you import them (or vice versa, in the case of modules that are written in other natural language variants), there is unlikely to be much of a problem from Perl's perspective. In terms of the Perl community, I suspect that we're best off assuming that most Perl modules and scripts should be written using the default English-based setting for the foreseeable future; the use of natural language variants should be considered to be a niche market. When and if English gets supplanted by some other language as the technical language of choice, this notion can be revisited. Assuming that Perl is still in reasonably wide use when that happens, it will have the flexibility to make the transition. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
