>Mark Wai wrote:
>>
>> At 07:43 PM 3/23/99 +0100, Joachim wrote:
>>
>> >However, there are serious problems.

Am I right in summarising this thread as follows:

-- Summary --

It has been suggested that, as well as providing facilities to display and
handle strings in differing languages and scripts, a programmer should be
able to program in those langagues and scripts, ie a Chinese programmer
should not be forced to program in English, but should be able to program
in Chinese.

Some objections have been raised:

(1) This will lead to either (a) a mixed language image, which will be hard
to read and maintain, or (b) several, incompatible, single-language
versions of Squeak.

(2) There are problems with characters which look the same but are actually
different ('a' in French and Cyrillic).

(Problem (2) isn't actually a problem specific to *programming* issues; but
part of the general problem of implementing multilingual strings.)

The root cause of problem (1) appears to be the difficulties involved in
translating a single piece of code into many different languages.

Suggestions for a way out which have been made (not suprisingly) have
focussed on machine translation.  This would presumably involve either a
many-to-many language translator to synchronise all of the code in a
system, or a one-to-many translator which forced you to provide a suitable
translation of your sourcecode in the default language (which could be
either English, or as Jecel's webpage suggests, a machine readable
"interlanguage").

Meanwhile, (Michael | Mike) Klein has tried to complicate matters by
introducing namespaces to the discussion :-)

Is that about the gist of it?

:)
Russell

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Russell Allen

russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com

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