Found some evidence of usage of identifiers in Japanese while doing a quick google search
All links below are in Japanese. * Ruby has support for Japanese identifiers (which is not unexpected when you know the origin country of Ruby) http://www.ruby-lang.org/ja/man/?cmd=view;name=%CA%D1%BF%F4%A4%C8%C4%EA%BF%F4 Notice that it says that this is only supported on a local basis. (probably because Ruby cannot handle unicode natively). I also found other people discussing their usage pattern of identifiers and Japanese and they also report this is tremedously useful for beginners especially when you need to read a stacktrace while debugging. * Java has strong supporter of Japanese characters within identifiers. http://java-house.jp/ml/archive/j-h-b/032664.html#body They comment that: using japanese improves readability unless used in an extreme way (like changing a *for* loop to use インデクス instead of i) One example they give is ------------------------------------------- i = revised(i); とか、 i = RevisedByMarubatuMethod(i); とか、 i = revised_by_marubatu_method(i); と書くよりは、 i = ○×方式による補正を行う(i); ------------------------------------------- And of course think the last one is the best..... Table of contents of "Visual J++ Applet Programming book" http://www.hir-net.com/book/book18/contents.html see "Chapter 2.2: You can use Japanese Identifiers !!!" Discussion about variable naming and how being able to use Japanese would solve many naming issues: http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/bbs/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=13878&forum=3&start=8&15 Another one like this, where people explain that because it is difficult to come up with good names in English they end up calling everything : makeItem, doItem, addItem http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/bbs/phpBB/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic=18616&forum=7&start=0 And for fun, there is this interesting link about a programming language "in Japanese", made for beginners (check this example... awesome!): http://nadesi.com/doc/cmd/doc.cgi?mode=cmd&id=200 I am sure you can find a lot more evidence like this for each and every language. Letting people use their own script and vocabulary to name things will make them better programmers in their own country/cultural reference point. This will increase the audience and support for Python worldwide. I will be contacting Japanese python user group and let them know of the current discussion. Regards, Guillaume _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
