Multilingual Squeak

ohshima at is.titech.ac.jp ohshima at is.titech.ac.jp
Fri Mar 26 03:15:53 UTC 1999


  Thank you for summarising.

> 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.

  I think 'programming in English (or Chinese)' is somewhat
misleading.  We write programs in Smalltalk, which is
defined in English terminology.

> 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.

  By observing what have been happening on mule-lisp
programming, I don't worry this so much.  When a person
wanted to distribute his/her program world-wide, he/she
wrote the program in ASCII.

  Some very private or domestic program uses other 'scripts'.
A good design is to relieve the obstacles for doing this as
possible.  But any kind of systematic keyword-to-keyword
translation doesn't make sense.

                                             OHSHIMA Yoshiki
                Dept. of Mathematical and Computing Sciences
                               Tokyo Institute of Technology 





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