From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id TAA07941 for caml-redistribution; Fri, 29 Oct 1999 19:03:40 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id XAA12878 for ; Thu, 28 Oct 1999 23:33:31 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from beach.frankfurt.netsurf.de (beach.frankfurt.netsurf.de [194.64.181.2]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id XAA14930 for ; Thu, 28 Oct 1999 23:33:30 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from ice.darmstadt.netsurf.de (board-37.darmstadt.netsurf.de [194.163.86.165]) by beach.frankfurt.netsurf.de (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id XAA29808; Thu, 28 Oct 1999 23:33:24 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from localhost (localhost [[UNIX: localhost]]) by ice.darmstadt.netsurf.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id XAA18114; Thu, 28 Oct 1999 23:28:45 +0200 From: Gerd Stolpmann Reply-To: Gerd.Stolpmann@darmstadt.netsurf.de Organization: privat To: Benoit Deboursetty Subject: Re: Go for ultimate localization! Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 23:00:14 +0200 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.21] Content-Type: text/plain References: Cc: caml-list@inria.fr MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <99102823284500.18066@ice> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: weis On Tue, 26 Oct 1999, Benoît de Boursetty wrote: > > So, O'CaML handles Latin-1 characters in the identifiers. This >allows most Europeans, well at least you and me, to use their own >language; but to me, it has always seemed a bit strange to write a program >with keywords in English, and identifiers in French. Indeed, I feel >it's really bogus when I try to read this out loud: > > "let élément = String.sub chaîne where chaîne = "... I have currently some projects in a bank in Frankfurt. Although our team often chooses English identifiers, there are sometimes special terms which are difficult to translate. Big organizations tend to have their own language, and everybody in the organization knows what is meant if one of the special words is used. For example, in this bank the German word "Sachgebiet" is a software application tied to an organizational unit; nobody outside would think at software if he or she hears this word; and it seems to be impossible to translate such a term to English because nobody inside the bank would understand it. So the only way out is to mix English and German words, e.g. get_sachgebiet as method of an object. I mention this example because it demonstrates that you cannot get rid of the local language even if you try hard. I think this is not different in Japan or other parts of the world, so non-Latin1 characters are really needed there. Please note: This argument has nothing to do with esthetics ("how it sounds"), the language mixture is simply necessary to make yourself understandable. The grammar (the language of the keywords) of Ocaml should be the same all over the world, otherwise you would split the software basis artificially. >It can be ridiculous when two speakers >of the same language come to speaking English to each other. Yes, but this is not the problem. We have also native English speakers in our team, and international teams are very normal in this world. John also mixes languages and it is sometimes very funny... Gerd -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gerd Stolpmann Telefon: +49 6151 997705 (privat) Viktoriastr. 100 64293 Darmstadt EMail: Gerd.Stolpmann@darmstadt.netsurf.de (privat) Germany ----------------------------------------------------------------------------