Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

On Tue, 27 Nov 2018, William Donzelli via cctalk wrote: APL requires adding additional characters. That was a major obstacle to acceptance, both in terms of keyboard and type ball (my use preceded CRT), but also asking the user/programmer to learn new characters. I loved APL! I love the use of an arrow for assignment. In teaching, a student's FIRST encounter with programming can be daunting. Use of an equal sign immediately runs up against the long in-grained concept of commutative equality. You would be surprised how many first time students try to say 3 = X . Then, of course, N = 1 N = N + 1 is a mathematical "proof by induction" that all numbers are equal! (Don't let a mathematician see that, or the universe will cease to exist, and be replaced by something even more inexplicable!) Even the archaic keyword "LET" in BASIC helped clarify that. We tend to be dismissive of such problems, declaring that students "need to LEARN the right way". I remember a cartoon in a publication, that might have been Interface Age, where an archeologist looking at hieroglyphics says that it looks like a subset of APL. But, I think that the comment was more in regards to programming by non-English speaking programmers. While FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC can be almost trivially adapted to Spanish, Italian, German, etc., What about Chinese? Japanese? Yes, there IS a Chinese COBOL! But, THOSE programmers essentially have to learn English before they can program! Surely a Chinese or Japanese based programming language could be developed. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com