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Programming in a language other than English


I was having a discussion on twitter about adding the ability of Ruby to use λ instead of lambda, and more generally about Unicode support. I realized that all the languages I know work only with English reserved words and mostly assume a us-en keyboard (for example using $ instead of £ or ¥). While some languages are now starting to have some support for Unicode in there string functions, there are still so many convention based on English or the Latin style character set. For example Ruby requires class names begin with an upper case letter, but upper and lower case is not a property of glyphs in most scripts.

So the question is: "Are there programming languages that work in a large set of languages, and how do they do it?"


Solution

  • You can have a look ant the APL programming language, for example.