[ruby-talk:11614] Re: Esperanto (was: trial balloon: Ruby desktop?)

In article <[e-mail]>,
Yukihiro Matsumoto <[e-mail]> wrote:
>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.

I can find at least oen feature that is quite the opposite of Japanese
language/culture.

For example, take expressions like "print if x == 3", where the
conditional clause goes at the end of the sentence.  This feature is
borrowed from Perl, and was invented to mimic English.  In Japanese,
however, subordinate clauses like "if" and "while" can never be at the
end of a sentence.

>  (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).

I noticed, while trying to convert over some Python code, that Unicode
doesn't yet seem to be a part of the language.  The program in question,
of course, was an Esperanto-enabled Entry widget for Python/Tk.
(Typing "sx", for example, produced an "s" with circumflex.)

-- 
Nick Bensema <[e-mail]>      ICQ#2135445 
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