From: utzoo!watmath!jcwinterton Newsgroups: net.nlang Title: Re: Programming in other languages Article-I.D.: watmath.3096 Posted: Tue Jul 27 02:03:03 1982 Received: Tue Jul 27 03:27:25 1982 References: ecn-pa.207 Many, many years ago, the U.S. Naval Electronic Research Laboratory published a book on a compiler and compiler generator system called NELIAC. This book contained the only version of a compiler which accepted ALGOL with all the keywords translated into any language you liked. There was an example in the book of the text of an entire program in Hawaiian, keywords and all. The only two translations I recall off hand were: ALOHA ::= BEGIN PAU ::= END Interesting, but when it comes to "standard" languages such as COBOL and PL/1, I believe that it is more important for keywords to be invariant across national and linguistic boundaries for the sake of portability. Variable names and labels are just arbitrary symbols and need not really be thought to have any semantic significance outside the program(s) in which they are defined. John Winterton