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