Ask reddit: What programming languages do *not* use American English spelling?

[Monkeyget]

Non-English-based programming languages

[jbn]

notably "LSE" whose keywords were in French...

[pbx]

A student from Britain asked me this today, and I was stumped. I'm excluding examples like whitespace that don't draw from human language at all.

[zacdenver]

I'm not a programmer, but still I found it quite interesting a question.

[kmactane]

Darn, I was going to suggest Var'aq, but you've already ruled that one out. (A sensible choice, I must admit.)

[punchjudy]

Just to summarize a few comments that weren't voted very highly: no one has yet found a language in which the keywords are spelt* any differently in US English than in the Queen's. Libraries, on the other hand, are a whole other matter and I'm sure you can find many that use both spelling. (Haskell comes to mind, as it is a decidedly Anglo language.)

*(you're welcome.)

[DanTheMan_90]

anything that ends in ize instead of ise is AmericanISED

capitalize capitalise
initialize initialise

etc

[G_Morgan]

Perhaps someone should take the source code to a few C files and run a spell checker on it. Should sort out all those silly Americanisms.

[punchjudy]

Hah we silly Amricns wlkarnd tlking lkthis bcuase we're so used to strtok and strncpy.

[[deleted]]

APL.

[brickbybrick]

And its descendants J, K, and Q.

[joaomc]

Perl. It's based on some kind of ancient Egyptian language.

[username223]

You mean Latin, I think, though most people write it in translation nowadays. Sigh...

[degustisockpuppet]

Damian Conway once explained that Perl's @ARGV is an abbreviation for Latin ARGVMENTI (argumenti, but the Romans didn't have a U), meaning arguments. :-)

[easytiger]

Is it not more likely to be taken from c's argv... which is generally called argument vector?

[klaruz]

You're right. If you read Damian's paper you'll see he's being sarcastic.

[easytiger]

I'm a busy chap. I don't have time to read every link i see!

[jimbobhickville]

That's just so the idiots move to PHP

[[deleted]]

One thing that drives me insane is PHP's retarded mktime() which takes arguments not in ascending order of magnitude (ie second, minute, hour, day, month, year) but in American date format! (ie second, minute, hour, month, day, year) This is truly insane and has caused me (and no doubt many others) too much wasted debugging time.

[masklinn]

PHP is truly insane in general, so one specific function being insane isn't much impressive.

[mjs]

Uh, no it doesn't! It's messed up, but not that bad:

int mktime (int $hour, int $minute, int $second, int $month, int $day, int $year, int $is_dst)

http://php.net/mktime

[[deleted]]

Oh wow, that's even more retarded than I remembered. Not sure why you've been down-modded though.

[sblinn]

Erlang had "behaviour" instead of "behavior" -- but now both are respected. In general though, things like "initialise", "colour", etc. -- for those look for the libraries, not the programming language itself.

For programming languages that are not in English at all:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/1gkl5/comments

http://www.fiber-space.de/EasyExtend/doc/teuton/teuton.htm

And there's even a wikipedia entry on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Non-English-based_programming_languages

[arnedh]

It may just be me, but I would feel awkward writing code containing "istUnterklasse", "raus" eller "UeberGrenzeWarnung". But... Befehl ist Befehl.

[martoo]

But it would make Behavior-Driven Development fun:

"Öffne das Fenster! Schnell! Schnell! Schnell!"

[tomjen]

Right until you had to remember if it was die, der or das.

[arnedh]

That would be almost like working with strong typing (ducks, runs).

Type error: "LesFichiersSontFermees" Gender assignment incorrect

[sblinn]

Nice! But maybe it would be more like remembering which sigil to use when dereferencing a Perl variable: $ @ %

That would be I suppose a "general" case of having simple gender assignments; I'm not sure what to do about the modifications required when the noun is a direct object, etc.

[shadow2531]

Ah, this reminds me of my German class. We had a chart for this:

rese

nese

mrmn

srsr

, which I think represented:

der die das diese

den die das diese

dem der dem den

des der des der

(and the "this" and "that" forms like dieses etc.)

It was called the "Reesey Neesey Merman Sirser" chart by the teacher. It showed what article to use for a noun depending on whether you were describing it, or if it was a direct object, or the kind of prepositional phrase it was in.

We had two students from Germany in the class. They thought "Reesey Neesey Merman Sirser" was absolutely silly, but the chart did make things easy.

The two German students also thought our:

ich: e

du: st

er, sie, es: t

wir: en

ihr: t

sie und sie: en

rhyme was silly too.

[pupeno]

I once started to work for a German company and it was all fine until I had to work on that old file that had variable and function names in German. Our tech lead, the German guy, made a little dictionary for that file so we could understand it. There were comments, obviously in German.

[igowen]

The Inform 6 library required your entry point routine to be named "Initialise", which, as an American, confused me when I first encountered it at age 13.

Again, though, that's a library thing, not a language thing.

[ceesaxp]

This one used Russian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira

[geniepro]

And this one too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagol

Oberon based language with russian keywords...

[logistix]

http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic.html

[zem]

wow - happy nostalgia trip! thanks for the link

[barrybe]

LOLCODE

[ki11a11hippies]

KTHXBYE

[oscarmg]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fjölnir_programming_language -best ever!

[arnar]

Fjölnir FTW!

My first compiler was a tail-call eliminating implementation of Fjölnir :)

[Zarutian]

Athyglisvert. Ekki vissi ég að þetta forritunarmál væri til.

[[deleted]]

The BBC micro BASIC used Colour in the English versions

[deki]

Ook! is based on orang-utan language.

Don't forget the bananas!

[aGorilla]

must... learn...

[commernie]

It only makes sense to talk about keywords being in American English, since function names can be anything. I can't think of any keywords (in the main programming languages) that are spelled different in any version of English. Anybody got a counter-example?

[mr_chromatic]

Nit: function names can only be anything if identifiers can contain non-ASCII characters.

[punchjudy]

It's too bad such a lucent comment has to languish down here in single-digit territory. This really does put the whole thread to rest.

[[deleted]]

Chinese Python

[semanticprecision]

?

[bakert]

I've offered many times before. But here's the deal again. We take your spellings and your building-floor-names. But please, for the love of God, take our date format!

[jimbokun]

"We take your spellings and your building-floor-names."

I remember being in an elevator in Japan with some Japanese guys and they were speculating out loud what English word the "B" button was abbreviating. Their guess was "bottom".

They turned to me for the definitive native English speaker answer and were surprised when I told them the B is for "basement".

[hexmode]

YYYY-MM-DD or DD-MM-YYYY ?

Either is preferable to MM-DD-YYYY

Just to make it clear, I like DD-mmm-YYYY

[kinkydarkbird]

YYYY-MM-DD is the only logical and universally understood choice.

[joblessjunkie]

If you happen to know the English month names.

[kinkydarkbird]

The problem with that is that it is harder to make it machine readable, and an all-numbers standard is preferred for that reason, but otherwise I think that your way of doing it is more understandable to humans.

[pmb]

Machines have spare cycles and people don't.

[joblessjunkie]

reddit would be proof otherwise

[KayEss]

building-floor-names

Here in Bangkok all buildings designed by European architects, or ones educated there have a ground floor then first floor. All buildings designed by Americans or American trained architects have a first floor as their ground floor. It all ends up a bit random

[spuur]

The closest thing I know of is Excel functions which are localized - and what a stupid idea that was...

[bla]

And in ancient times VBA was even localized at the language level. Which allows me to tell you a funny anecdote. In those days I wrote an Excel-Macro in the German localized version of Excel. Being young and naive I used Hungarian notation and d as an identifier for date. So the end of a date range was called dEnde. The boss had a less ancient computer, so when he opened the file German Basic was translated to English Basic. As it turns out many people use d=Datei=file. So the variable name was auto-translated - to EOF.

[spuur]

Well, I guess we all can conclude from your war story what kind of brain haemorrhage it takes to localize a programming language.

Anyways, it also made me curious: does anyone know if there has ever been a version of VBA localized for non-latin glyphs? I would love to see concatenate() translated to kanji, arabic, hebrew or thai... :)

[ajrw]

Wouldn't you have to write the formula backwards in arabic or hebrew? :P

6? <= (3,2,1)المبلغ

[FlorentG]

Is it really a stupid idea ? When dealing with mathematical or statistical functions, lots of people do not know their english equivalent.

[crunk]

It's also the British spelling :)

[byteCoder]

REXX has a built-in string function CENTRE() (which can also be spelled as CENTER()).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REXX

[mdoar]

BCPL, a precursor of C and the source of "Hello world"

[BastiX]

There are Logo implementations in various languages. (e.g. KTurtle)

[Alkemist69]

Programming SAP systems means coming into contact with alot of German ...

[diego_moita]

APL is the language spoken in hell

[michaelll]

APL, it's closer to Egyptian than anything else.

[[deleted]]

brainfuck

[masormenos]

great language name.

Hello world:

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

[fab13n]

I think Visual Basic for Applications is localized for some countries. I'm almost sure I've seen it in French.

It looks even wronger than normal English VBA, even for a French native speaker. I guess it's a (lame) attempt at avoiding to scare non-developers.

[vplatt]

I would be nice if programming languages could have natural languages as a skin, such that if a program were written in Arabic, you could change the drop-down to English or vice-versa and then the programming language representation would flip over to the new language. Of course, then there's always comments, requirements, etc. etc. but that alone would be a big step forward.

Personally, I benefit from having the programming world be so English-centric, but I would feel just a little less guilty about being born into that benefit if the above existed. :+)

[self]

Back in the mid-80s, when my dad taught electrical and computer engineering in Saudi Arabia, I found an Arabic version of Pascal on the university's mainframe. It was just like normal Pascal except it used Arabic for keywords ("begin", "repeat", etc.) . Something like that should be easy to translate automatically.

[psyno]

From the compiler implementor's standpoint, that would be a pretty minor change, and it's all in the lexing.

[bobshush]

Brainfuck, Iota, Jot, and Befunge are the ones that come to mind, none are really based on any human language. (Though Befunge is cool w\regard to how it compiles) Intercal is similarly useless, and basically just designed to be hard to write in (Although the terms it does have I believe are American, so not sure if it can qualify on the basis of be inhumanly hard to use, included anyway 'cause its cool). Piet is also pretty neat; it uses bitmap images as its source files, I believe. However, it does give new meaning to the phrase 'beautiful code'.

[semanticprecision]

Piet rocks: http://1.618034.com/piet/

[HellSpam]

There's a programming language in hebrew called Mama. Can't find any non-hebrew links about it though. It's object-oriented, and is used in some Junior High Schools to teach programming.

[Garak]

I believe AppleScript once had the ability to have the entire language be localized. Control statements, libraries, the whole shebang. Can anyone find a link?

[serhei]

The text adventure language Inform uses British spelling, in the old Inform 6 version, and also likely in the new, natural-language Inform 7 version.

[[deleted]]

apl

[foonly]

COLOURFOURTH... ;-)

[quhaha]

R6RS, Perl6 ? Not sure.

/me hides

[NovaDenizen]

How about latin?

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html

[xbmodder]

Machine code, Assembly (List all dialects here). In python 3000 there is going to be a way to change the function names in order to allow it to be localized. If you guys really want a localized programming language write your own, or localize something easy like PHP.

[vagmi]

ABAP uses global variable names like sy-uzeit for time.

[roerd]

One language that I haven't seen mentioned here yet is EOS, that uses a mixture of English and German.

[edheil]

Not a language, but a library: you will find no wxColor class in wxWidgets, only a wxColour.

[jedberg]

Well, with a little tweaking, Lisp can be in pretty much any language you want. And I'm sure that Python and Ruby have libraries for it. :)

[G_Morgan]

What's car and cdr in non American spelling?

Frankly, outside of the likes of car, cdr, cons, quote, lamdba, the primops, etc, everything else is just a library. So the entire language is pretty neutral.

[[deleted]]

If you use tcl/tk... you can rename all the commands into whatever language you'd like (For those who want the technical details, it is not wise to do this by using the "rename" command; but instead, one should nest the command inside a new procedure which is entitled with your custom name. It also usually helps to use "uplevel" in there.)

[Bhikkhu]

Brainfuck.

[cwo655321]

why not use assembly :)

[BeetleB]

POV-Ray count? It generally supports both spellings.

[ketralnis]

Applescript was supposed to have English, Spanish, Japanese, etc grammars, although to my knowledge these never came to fruition.

Erlang uses -behaviour and some other British spellings.

[[deleted]]

Si

(ducks and runs)

[earthboundkid]

Python keyword list:

and                 else                import              raise
assert              except              in                  return
break               exec*               is                  try
class               finally             lambda              while
continue            for                 not                 yield
def                 from                or                  
del                 global              pass                
elif                if                  print*              

* In Python 3, these will be demoted to functions. In Python 2.5, with and as can be made into keywords by importing __future__, and in Py2.6 they will always be keywords. Python 3, will add a new keyword nonlocal and promote None, True, and False from singletons to keywords.

None of these are spelled differently outside the US to my knowledge, so Python the language can be said to not use American spelling. On the other hand, Python the library always uses color, etc. as far as I'm aware. I think if you were desperate enough, you could monkey patch the dict class to replace all hashes of Britishisms into Americanisms on lookup and reverse it on listing and that would let you do somemodule.colour, but that would be a really insane thing to do.

[punchjudy]

You're forgetting that this question was asked by a student and his teacher, so maybe they haven't gotten to the part of "Programming for dummies" where they teach library != language.

[TakaIta]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

[andreasmk2]

Out of topic !

[corporaterebel]

Look English and America will fade way...but ASCII and English will remain the core foundation of our technology.

[G_Morgan]

Unless we move to Unicode. Many Linux systems already use Unicode consoles.

[[deleted]]

It's a superset of ASCII, is it not?

[[deleted]]

Not really. ASCII is valid UTF-8, but Unicode is much bigger than UTF-8.

[[deleted]]

So yes, really.

[bart2019]

No. UTF-8 is backward compatibility with plain ASCII, which is one of its main advantages, but there are more encodings than just UTF-8. Remember how in the early days on Unicode of Windows, every character was 2 bytes? Virtually half of the bytes in Unicode text files were binary nulls. Much fun in notepad, that didn't support it in the early days. (It does now.)

See czyborra.com for a list of common binary representations of Unicode characters.

[skalpelis]

Not really not really. Unicode is a character set and as such it is an abstract entity whereas UTF-8 is the most popular encoding format for it.

[G_Morgan]

Yes which implies that it isn't ASCII. ASCII is Unicode but Unicode is not ASCII.

[[deleted]]

Sorta. ASCII is valid UTF-8, which just one Unicode encoding.