Re: A system for localizing documentation strings

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> writes:

> In article <ur6mudrli.fsf@gnu.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> > From: Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp>
>> > Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:22:46 +0900
>> > 
>> > There is absolutely _no_ need whatsoever for Japanese people to learn  
>> > _any_ bit of English to become excellent programmers.
>
>> Handa-san, could you please give us your perspective on this
>> assertion?
>
> To become an excellent programmer, one must read a code
> written by the other people, and for that, English is
> mandatory.  Not only comments, but also function names,
> variable names, etc. are mostly based on English words.  If
> they are all some random alphabets something like
> "lkvkdloa", it's almost impossible to track codes.

Historically, Basic identifiers were restricted to two letters
(possibly also just one letter and an optional digit, don't remember).

Anyway, anecdotal story: in my youth, I had been dabbling in assembly
language quite a lot: it was the thing to do if you wanted to get
serious tasks done within the 64kB restraint.  I have transferred one
arcade game from that time into C code about 14 years or so after it
had been written.  Identifiers were confined to 6 letters.  In most of
the program parts, the comments were exclusively numerical:
accumulated execution cycles.

The program flow was obvious and understandable.  Of course, I had
written the program myself.

Another experience I remembered is disassembling a Reversi program.
It was a piece of beauty: the index registers of the Z80 were employed
in an obvious way mapping to the boards and the bookkeeping stacks
respectively, and the whole thing worked with heuristic tables and
alpha/beta-pruning.  The control logic was concise and obvious.  All I
had was the binary for understanding, and it was the work of a master,
nothing deliberate in it.

The moral?  None I can discern.

-- 
David Kastrup