On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 15:00, Juerd wrote:
> Aaron Sherman skribis 2005-04-11 14:49 (-0400):
> > Yes, but it will be spelled:
> > use $*LANG ;-)
> > Seriously, is there some reason that we would not provide a
> > "Language::Russian" and "Language::Nihongo"? Given Perl 6, it would even
> > be quite valid for those modules to add aliases for all of the core
> > functions and keywords, not just global variables.
>
> Because providing it leads to its use, and when it gets used, knowing
> English is no longer enough.
I don't think you can say (as Larry has) that you want to be able to
fully re-define the language from within itself and still impose the
constraint that "it can't confuse people who don't know anything about
my module."
You might argue that Language::Dutch should never ship with the core...
that's a valid opinion, but SOMEONE is going to write it. It'd be a kind
of strange form of censorship for CPAN not to accept it. After all,
there's more than one way to say it... isn't there?
> English sucks in many interesting ways, but at least it's a de facto
> standard and documentation will be available in it.
Let's think about this in terms other than someone distributing code to
the masses. What about teaching? If I were going to teach the basic
concepts of programming, I'd like to do so with a language whose
constructs are all native. This is simply practical: having to learn
vocabulary at the same time that you learn a new WAY of communicating
makes it harder. If CPAN had a Language::NYUpperEastSide, then I might
consider using that for my elementary computer class rather than try to
teach everyone real English AND programming in one year ;-)
> I'm not even sure I like the *possibility* of using non-ascii letters in
> identifiers, even.
I think we already have Latin-1 in identifiers... let me check. Yep:
pugs> my $Ã = 1;
undef
pugs> $Ã;
1
Let's see about UTF-8....
pugs> my $à = 1;
undef
pugs> $à;
1
A-yup!
--
Aaron Sherman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Senior Systems Engineer and Toolsmith
"It's the sound of a satellite saying, 'get me down!'" -Shriekback
