From: utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!uwvax!rama
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Title: Re: Programming in other languages
Article-I.D.: uwvax.498
Posted: Thu Jul 22 12:31:33 1982
Received: Sun Jul 25 23:50:26 1982



I worked for a company in India, where some work was underway
to come up with Hindi and Telugu versions of FORTRAN.
For the benefit of the ignorant, Hindi is the national language of
India and Telugu is a regional language spoken in south India.
(Not to mention that India is in Asia and not in Caribbean!!)
The version which I saw in operation was a Telugu one.
The compiler would accept a program written in Telugu and print the
output in Telugu.

Unfortunately, since there were not any peripheral manufacturer
making Telugu keyboards, the English keyboard had to be faked to act
as a Telugu keyboard.  The output was routed through a matrix printer
to print the output in Telugu.  There was a pre-processor which
processed the Telugu text and made on the fly translation to English
text before feeding it to the standard FORTRAN compiler.
I believe this process was complicated quite a bit because of the fact
that FORTRAN does not have the notion of keywords.

I am familiar only with the early stages of this project so am not
familiar with the current status.

				Kishore Ramachandran
				rama@uwisc