2013/7/5 Richard Wordingham <[email protected]> > I've seen French comments in Fortran that just drop all the accents - > most disconcerting to read! > This is an old problem. It first appeared because lack of Unicode support in famous historic programming languages (and it persists today in common languages like C, C++, Basic, Fortran, Cobol, Ada, Pascal...), but now it should be noted that many French programmers have a very poor level of orthography and don't know how to select the proper accents (they also often don't care about correct capitalization, using English rules in their programs, or copying the capitalization of English in programs UI, such as capitals on every word, even where it would not even be used notammly in English; correct punctuatin is also frequently ignored. In propram comments, nobody cares about that, because users of applications will notmally not see them, and because I18n and L10n is handled elsewhere in code and data).
If you are trying to learn French, you won't understand the contents found in many French-speaking popular talk areas or forums (and it will be worse in many short Facebook status, Tweets, SMS, and chat: if you're not cumfortable with the most common deviations, you will hate these places, and will not use it very often for some time, then will learn how to use these only for selected users and communities...). They are generally horroble and there's even an widely accepted policy to not complain about the orthography used by others (because this raises flaming and pollutes more). Yes we are horrified, but most will silently adapt to that fact. After all this is a living language, and languages will evolve with such simplifications, or initial "abuses" that will be integrated sooner or later. As ong as nobody complains against those that use the standard orthography, and there's still an effort to make it understood, the orthography will accept some of these simplified forms, if they don't introduce too much confusion. We remember the battles about the 1999 French ortthographic reform: it was highly criticized, but anyway now, people accept it indifferently... except some administrations that still want to use an official jargon with standardized words, expressions, and orthographies.
