Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!ubc-cs!alberta!news From: gilles@alberta.uucp (Gilles Simon Dionne) Newsgroups: can.general Subject: Re: Canada -- One or two cultures Message-ID: <1989Aug13.204235.18993@alberta.uucp> Date: 13 Aug 89 20:42:35 GMT References: <89Aug3.145600edt.10404@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <28168@watmath.waterloo.edu> <3521@uwovax.uwo.ca> Reply-To: gilles@cavell.UUCP (Gilles Simon Dionne) Distribution: can Organization: University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Lines: 36 In article kim@watsup.waterloo.edu (T. Kim Nguyen) writes: >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. Perhaps, you can't understand French ? This does make it much harder to comprehend!! :-) >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. >-- Why? Do you care if your favorite software package is written in C, Pascal or Modula II or directly in assembler ? You don't see what's inside so what is the difference to you? I believe it is the same for "French" or "English" programming languages. If they write the "best" software on the market, why should they have problems selling it? Maintenance by local people you say? Well, do remember that translating an English computer language into a French computer language mostly only involves changing the table of keywords recognized by the compiler. It is not very hard to make a translator available. When I did my Bachelors degree at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, we had both a "French Pascal", an "English Pascal" and a "French to English translator". I found that I could work with either pretty much interchangeably. Gilles