[ruby-talk:11539] Re: Esperanto (was: trial balloon: Ruby desktop?)

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:11483] Re: Esperanto (was: trial balloon: Ruby desktop?)"
    on 01/02/25, "Ben Tilly" <[e-mail]> writes:

|BTW an interesting note.  A lot of programming
|is English affected in ways we don't even see.
|The full extent of this was driven home to me by
|Damian Conway in a talk where he explained how
|he tried to map Perl onto a subset of Latin.
|English (and therefore virtually all programming
|languages) is positional.  "The boy gave the dog
|the food." means something totally different than
|"The dog gave the boy the food."  By contrast
|Latin is an inflected language, the ending of the
|word indicates the grammatical role.  "Puer dedit
|cani escam." means exactly what "Escam dedit puer
|cani."  And in fact would normally be said, "Puer
|cani escam dedit."

You might know Japanese is inflected language too.
Although I didn't make Ruby so.  Happy for most of you. ;-)

Ruby is influenced a lot from existing programming language and UNIX,
as a result, it's almost based on western culture.  But I can find
several features of Ruby influenced by Japanese language/culture.

  (a) you can put `_' everywhere in decimal, not in every 3 digits,
      like 1_0000_0000, because we count numbers based on 10000, not
      1000 (but we still put commas in every 3 digits).

  (b) Time#mon starts from 1, not 0, because Japanese don't use names
      of months (anymore, we used to call them by names long ago), we
      call them by numbers, e.g. 1st month (ichi gatsu), 2nd month, etc.

  (c) you can handle multibyte characters by specifying -K option,
      which K is for Kanji (Japanese/Chinese characters).  And its
      multibyte features are totally centric to Japanese (yet, I'm
      working on it).

							matz.