Non-English programming languages was Re: Text encoding Babel.

[Paul Koning]

> On Nov 27, 2018, at 10:06 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>> Surely a Chinese or Japanese based programming language could be 
>> developed.
> 
> The Tomy Pyuuta has a very limited BASIC variant called G-BASIC which has
> Japanese keywords and is programmed with katakana characters (such as "kake"
> for PRINT). It freely interchanges with the Tomy Tutor's GBASIC (no dash)
> with the same tokens, documented here:
> 
> 	https://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/tomy/gbkeyw.html

There appear to be quite a number of non-English languges, though it isn't clear how many of these have significant user bases.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages.

In particular, that article mentions the fact that Algol 68 explicitly aimed for translation into other languages, both of the language definition (the "Report") and of the language itself.  And indeed this was done; the Wikipedia article has a link to the Russian specification which clearly shows a Russian version of the language.

	paul