Re: [DISCUSSION] Multilingual PHP

Hi! > I'll stop there cause I know there are problems I haven't thought of. And > I'm not going to argue the syntax I just kicked out from the top of my head > is the best either. For better or for worse, English is the lingua franca of the internet technology. You can, of course, create a compiler which would understand keywords in other languages. This compiler will be used by 0.001% of the main language user base, code written with it will be inaccessible to any person who does not read that language, and communication between the users of different language-branches of the project would be virtually zero because they literally would have no common language. I don't think this would help anyone. Yes, basic knowledge of English is currently a requirement to engage with most technologies. Once you have mastered it, however, the whole technology world is available to you, at one-time investment. Fragmenting this world into tiny pieces, each with its own language, would not make these parts more accessible to each other. > But I think it's worth the effort to at least look into the problem. Wired > has a point - people learn to code faster when they are working with their > own language. One of the stated goals of PHP's design has been My native language is not English. Moreover, my first foreign language wasn't English either. I had no more trouble learning BASIC (yes, I am that old) or Pascal than I had learning programming languages based on my native tongue. The only difference is that the former translated pretty well into other languages I encountered when I progressed with my learning, while the latter did not, it was an isolated island not connected to anything else. -- Stas Malyshev smalyshev@gmail.com