Do there exist any compilers with localized versions of programming languages?

Question

I have often wondered why it is that non-English speaking programmers are forced to use a different language when programming when it would seem to be so easy to offer an IDE that could replace keywords with localized versions. Why can't the Germans use a "während..macht" loop?

Do programmers in Japan, Germany, France, Spain, Botswana just make extensive use of macros/define statements to make life more tolerable or do they just get used to the functional significance of print, if, then, while, do, begin, end, var, double, function, etc?

Perhaps the increased use of frameworks (J2EE/.NET) makes this more complicated, but it still seems worthwhile. On the other hand, if Klingon became the de-facto programming language in the US I'd probably regret suggesting this.

Answer 1

In most programming languages, keywords are reserved, so they can't be used for variable names etc.

Now suppose the keywords changed every time you changed culture - code written in one culture couldn't be ported to another without changing identifiers. Ick. Furthermore, when anyone copied their code onto a question forum like this, we'd no longer be speaking the same language, as it were.

There are distinct advantages to only having one culture in the programming language itself...

Answer 2

No! Never use the "localization" for you sources. English is de-facto standard for the programming and it helps a lot and makes this world a little better.

The code should be portable and comprehensible to everybody (when possible), localization would kill this possibility.

I speak Russian, Italian and a little bit of English, but I've used anything else but English in my job.

Answer 3

This sort of thing isn't unique to computer languages. All the control words for music are in Italian (andante, allegro, crescendo, etc.). This has worked well for a long time.

Besides, it allows programs to be shared more easily. Suppose you were trying to integrate a function from a Finnish programmer into a module in French, and wanted to send it for further integration to your Australian colleague.

Answer 4

There is a development language in France which is called WinDev where all the code is entirely french localized.

Answer 5

This is the same as air traffic control. It's been pretty much standardized in English. While that may make flying slightly more difficult if your native language isn't English, it's not too difficult to learn the specific subset of English necessary to get the job done... but could you imagine what would happen if pilots could just try and speak whatever language they were most comfortable with to the controllers... and the controllers could respond in whatever language they liked most? I certainly wouldn't fly internationally anymore :)

Answer 6

this is a hot topic

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/202723/coding-in-other-spoken-languages

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/11/podcast-29/

Answer 7

In old (really old) Word version you would write your macro's in WordBasic. The WordBasic was localized.

Answer 8

The French (and, IIRC, German and some other languages) version of Office once has a localized version of VBA.

They pulled it off, because it was a very bad idea! It is OK for casual users, making occasional use of macros, but as soon as you start searching information on Internet, want to share your code, etc., it is a nightmare. Not to mention opening a French worksheet in a Spanish Excel... (although I suppose they saved bytecode, not literals - so say running a German macro copied somewhere on a French Excel).

VB (and some other languages, like Lua) allows to use identifiers with accents, etc. I recall I used in intensively a long time ago. It looks odd now, and again, it makes very hard to share code.
Similarly, I am uneasy when I see code with Spanish or Chinese comments...

For the record, in the time of 8bit computers, a French computer (TO8) has a French version of Basic: instead of WHILE ... WEND, we had FAIRE ... JUSQUA (or something similar).

Anyway, such localized computer languages are quite scarce now... For better or for worse, English is the lingua franca of computer science. At least it is not the hardest language to learn. And the vocabulary of most languages (at least the keyword set) is quite limited.

The only problem is when we try to teach programming to young people not knowing English, but they learn fast.

Answer 9

No, and there really can't be. If you take a C compiler, for example, and localize the keywords into a different language, you will have a perfectly viable programming language but it is, by definition, no longer a C compiler.

C may have keywords like if and for which are obviously derived from English, but they are not English keywords, they are C keywords.

That being said, I have often wondered why we haven't seen programming languages based on other human languages. Are they just not that well known?

Answer 10

Not a programming language per se, but Microsoft Excel is known for its function names to be localized. Luckily opening an Excel sheet in a different language version does not break your formulas as they get translated.

Answer 11

I'd be surprised if there weren't a Chinese-localized clone of the open version of several languages. Especially gcc/g++. They're big enough to have their own ecosystem around it and you really wouldn't have much if any collision between chinese and english identifiers.

Considering that chinese written languages differ so fundamentally from western languages, I'll be even more surprised if there isn't a pure-chinese language with no western equivalent that takes advantage of those differences.

Answer 12

The Brazilians who created Lua used English keywords like if and while. The French who worked on ML also used English keywords. Stroustrup, Guido and Linus all come from non-English countries (although I believe they all learned English at a young age). And you can't forget Matz's work on Ruby.

I don't want to be snobbish, but English is the closest thing programmers have to a Lingua Franca.

Answer 13

In some cases, keywords aren't even English (though they may vaguely resemble English words): car, cdr, and cons from Lisp; elsif in Perl; printf, fgets, sscanf, and many more from C. I think most languages have at least some keywords that aren't localized even for English speakers.

Keywords belong to the programming language, not the programmer's (spoken) language.

Answer 14

When I first did Applescript that was localised, don't know if it is still true.

Answer 15

When I was a kid, there was a version of the Logo programming language (interpreted) in Hebrew. I vaguely remember a faux-BASIC in the same language.

These were horrible to use though because letters are written RTL and numbers and symbols were written LTR, and the old ASCII based PCs/Apples couldn't really handle that kind of a beating.

Answer 16

I pray I have seen a program written in MS Visual Basic 5 or 6 with russian keywords!

Answer 17

I found one!

Lexico.NET: Lexico is a Spanish language object-oriented educational programming language based on the .NET Framework.