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From: John Savard <quadibloc@servername.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Unicode in strings
Date: Sun, 19 May 2024 15:32:49 -0600
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On Tue, 14 May 2024 17:43:43 +0000, mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1)
wrote:

>I think people in Japan should be able to use printf by using ?????
>There is way to much "english" in the way computers are being used.
>It is similar to Anthropomorphizing animal behavior.

One could quibble.

If Japanese people needed to enter kana from their keyboards to write
programs, that would be awkward; there is not yet a good way to enter
that kind of text from a keyboard.

However, I think your point is valid. At least in some contexts.

Remember back in the early 8-bit days of computing, and before them,
when schools were exposing children to PDP-8 computers?

Children were learning to program computers in BASIC.

Obviously, here, if children in other countries used modified versions
of BASIC that used keywords in their own natural language, it would be
much easier for them to get started with programming than if the
keywords were simply arbitrary strings of letters, taken from a
foreign language of which they may not necessarily have any knowledge.

If Algol was supposed to be an _international_ algorithmic language,
why weren't its keywords taken from Latin or Esperanto, instead of
English?

Historical note: Algol was originally called IAL; remember what JOVIAL
stood for.

But the objections about sharing code between countries, and the fact
that English is so widely known in technical circles, are also true.
It is a complicated issue, made worse by the fact that nationalism and
ethnocentricism are often bad things.

John Savard