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