Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!watcgl!kim From: kim@watsup.waterloo.edu (T. Kim Nguyen) Newsgroups: can.general Subject: Re: Canada -- One or two cultures Message-ID: Date: 12 Aug 89 06:07:09 GMT References: <89Aug3.145600edt.10404@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <28168@watmath.waterloo.edu> <3521@uwovax.uwo.ca> Sender: daemon@watcgl.waterloo.edu Distribution: can Organization: PAMI Group, U. of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 21 In-reply-to: gerard@uwovax.uwo.ca's message of 11 Aug 89 12:22:37 GMT In article <3521@uwovax.uwo.ca> gerard@uwovax.uwo.ca (Gerard Stafleu) writes: In the late sixties the French government had ALGOL-60 officially translated into French (meaning that keywords like BEGIN, END, PROCEDURE and so on got translated to French equivalents). Then there was a strong drive to use the French version in schools, universities and so on. I'm not sure how successful this exercise was in the end, or whether they repeated it with other languages. I once got a close look at the French-ized version of Logo. It was absolutely incomprehensible. From the major French computing magazines that I saw, programs were written in the normal "English" computer languages. Perhaps the French have gone on with their language conversion, but if they have, they are simply heading for a dead end, because no one else in the world will use that language but them, not when even the Japanese use the English versions. -- Kim Nguyen kim@watsup.waterloo.edu Systems Design Engineering -- University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada