Re: Scheme, Lisp, and a Central Future

["Peter H. Froehlich" <address@hidden>]

Hi!

On Wednesday, December 26, 2001, at 04:44 , Luigi Ballabio wrote:

> At 8:56 PM -0500 12/25/01, Ronald D Stephens wrote:
>> 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.

I agree with Luigi, but I also have a more extreme opinion to add 
(feel free to flame in private):

    All code should be written in 7-bit ASCII
    (except *maybe* for string literals).

There is already enough "trivial" portability trouble in the 
"stupid" CR/LF issue. For example, there was a long discussion on 
the Python mailing lists about this concerning Mac / Windoze / Unix 
source code portability. Why add more trouble by allowing even more 
complex encodings? I for one believe that "cultural imperialism" is 
less of a concern here than practicality.

Localization concerns should be handled outside the language using 
standard libraries that match internal message codes to whatever 
actually gets displayed; good software engineering (separation of 
concerns) and less trouble for the compiler hacker seem to go hand 
in hand here.

Peter

PS: I also share Luigi's view on localized programming language 
dialects, which in my case traces back to a German basic 
interpreter in which programs read like bad jokes... (LIES N; FUER 
I VON 1 BIS N; DRUCKE I; NAECHSTES;)
--
Peter H. Froehlich <<><>> http://www.ics.uci.edu/~pfroehli/
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