Do there exist any compilers with localized versions of programming languages?

Question

I have often wondered why it is that non-English speaking programmers are forced to use a different language when programming when it would seem to be so easy to offer an ID

Answer 1

When I was a kid, there was a version of the Logo programming language (interpreted) in Hebrew. I vaguely remember a faux-BASIC in the same language.

These were horrible to use though because letters are written RTL and numbers and symbols were written LTR, and the old ASCII based PCs/Apples couldn't really handle that kind of a beating.

Answer 2

In most programming languages, keywords are reserved, so they can't be used for variable names etc.

Now suppose the keywords changed every time you changed culture - code written in one culture couldn't be ported to another without changing identifiers. Ick. Furthermore, when anyone copied their code onto a question forum like this, we'd no longer be speaking the same language, as it were.

There are distinct advantages to only having one culture in the programming language itself...

Answer 3

I pray I have seen a program written in MS Visual Basic 5 or 6 with russian keywords!

Answer 4

The French (and, IIRC, German and some other languages) version of Office once has a localized version of VBA.

They pulled it off, because it was a very bad idea! It is OK for casual users, making occasional use of macros, but as soon as you start searching information on Internet, want to share your code, etc., it is a nightmare. Not to mention opening a French worksheet in a Spanish Excel... (although I suppose they saved bytecode, not literals - so say running a German macro copied somewhere on a French Excel).

VB (and some other languages, like Lua) allows to use identifiers with accents, etc. I recall I used in intensively a long time ago. It looks odd now, and again, it makes very hard to share code.
Similarly, I am uneasy when I see code with Spanish or Chinese comments...

For the record, in the time of 8bit computers, a French computer (TO8) has a French version of Basic: instead of WHILE ... WEND, we had FAIRE ... JUSQUA (or something similar).

Anyway, such localized computer languages are quite scarce now... For better or for worse, English is the lingua franca of computer science. At least it is not the hardest language to learn. And the vocabulary of most languages (at least the keyword set) is quite limited.

The only problem is when we try to teach programming to young people not knowing English, but they learn fast.

Answer 5

In old (really old) Word version you would write your macro's in WordBasic. The WordBasic was localized.

Answer 6

I found one!

Lexico.NET: Lexico is a Spanish language object-oriented educational programming language based on the .NET Framework.

Also, Wikipedia has a whole page listing more.