Re: Scheme, Lisp, and a Central Future

[Luigi Ballabio <address@hidden>]

At 8:56 PM -0500 12/25/01, Ronald D Stephens wrote:
>A programming language could be created, based on Scheme, but using Chinese
>characters rather than the western alphabet.
>
>Why should the whole world, for all time, be shackled to the 
>limitations of one European language and one alphabetic system?

Well, portability comes to mind---not meant as platform dependency, 
but simply as the fact that a program in english can be read, 
understood and improved by about any programmer on the planet. For 
the time being, the same is hardly true for a program using Chinese 
characters. Of course it might be that the thing gains momentum, and 
this becomes a non-issue.

Also, the above doesn't apply to Chinese as such---I'm Italian, but 
were someone to write an Italian language or translate in Italian an 
existing one, I wouldn't touch it with a very long pole.
Anecdotal evidence of the above: a former colleague of mine once got 
a new computer with some Italian version of Windows installed---and 
incredibly enough, the Italian version of Visual Basic came with it. 
Not only he had to relearn all the keywords in order to get some work 
done until he could install the English version, but also we couldn't 
help laughing every time he showed us a piece of code...

Just my $0.02,
		Luigi

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