Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dino!sharkey!mailrus!uflorida!ufqtp!bernhold From: bernhold@qtp.ufl.edu (David E. Bernholdt) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng Subject: Re: Question on programming languages ("foreign" keywords) Message-ID: <689@orange19.qtp.ufl.edu> Date: 27 Sep 89 17:36:43 GMT References: <8720001@hplsla.HP.COM> <89267.181118UH2@PSUVM.BITNET> <16126@vail.ICO.ISC.COM>Reply-To: bernhold@qtp.ufl.edu (David E. Bernholdt) Organization: University of Florida Quantum Theory Project Lines: 22 In article sra@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Stephen Adams) writes: >I know a couple of programmers who program in COBOL for a living and >are glad that they dont have english as their first language. They >rarely pick a variable name only to find that it is one of COBOLs >hundreds of reserved words :-). All questions of "proper" programming style, etc. aside, here's my encounter with multi-lingual programmers: A few years ago, I had need of a Fortran program which had last been worked on by a native Japenese who was a post-doc in my research group. The original code was not well documented. The postdoc had made some modifications and the comments he put in were in Japanese (transliterated to the ASCII alphabet -- I guess they call that romanji?). Luckily, I happened to know someone who could translate them for me. Interestingly, most of the variables he added, etc. were reasonably mnemonic to English. -- David Bernholdt bernhold@qtp.ufl.edu Quantum Theory Project bernhold@ufpine.bitnet University of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611 904/392 6365