Kickstarter 2013 Revisited

[Geoff Canyon]

Not in english? repeat, while, with, if, filter, replace, line, word, etc.,
etc. I'm not saying the syntax is english, but the words clearly are.

With the language extension capability that is coming Some Day Now, yes, I
would expect that everyone could program in their own language. I wonder
how that will work out.

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 12:24 PM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 11/05/15 17:06, Geoff Canyon wrote:
>
> "the language *itself* is in english"
>
> Well, apart from the oversight of not capitalising the name of the
> language,
> I don't think "the language" (i.e. the scripting language inwith LiveCode)
> is
> "in" English, nor is it English, it is, at best, something English-like,
> and, as
> time goes on and the language develops it tends to stray away from its
> semblance to English and increasingly resemble other programming languages
> (such as C++, which is not surprising considering what is going on in the
> mother-ship).
>
> The ASCII set is ancient history - I remember both learning it in 1975
> (when I was 13)
> and attending a lecture at the University of Durham in 1984 when it was
> pointed out how
> cramping and limiting the ASCII set would eventually prove to be.
>
> Now, here we are 30-odd years later (after I went to that lecture) and all
> sorts of things
> have happened (in case anyone hasn't noticed them):
>
> 1. No more totalitarian Commie bloc - who, by the way, did a lot of work
> on how to
> implement Cyrillic.
>
> 2. The Asian "Tiger" has got us all shaking in our boots, except for
> clever chaps like Andy Parng
> who manage to have the best of both worlds.
>
> 3. India; a totally whacked-out country that manages to sport more writing
> systems inside its borders
> than one cares to think of.
>
> Oddly enough, in 1989 I was spending my spare time in Al Ain, in the UAE
> (where I was teaching English and Maths at an
> Egyptian, Muslim school) implementing several non-latin scripts on a BBC
> Micro: being, as usual, so far ahead of the wave that
> I ended washed up on the beach. :)
>
> I should be grateful that I am 53 and not 23 (although, frankly, I'm not)
> insofar as my job as an EFL teacher
> is seriously threatened as within a generation people are probably not
> going to want to learn English anymore:
> it's going to be Mandarin Chinese in all probability.
>
> And the "bl**dy-minded" Chinese, for all the talk about Pinyin, are JUST
> NOT going to give up their
> writing system in a hurry, which makes the ASCII set look like 3 LEGO
> blocks and a pair of wheels versus
> LEGO Technic and Mindstorms.
>
> While HyperCard WAS (and I am capitalising that deliberately) written in
> pseudo-English that was for the simple
> reason that at that point the ONLY people who were buying Apple's
> computers were North Americans and Richmond, who happened
> to be in North America at the time (thanks to his academically brilliant
> Bulgarian wife who got a Fulbright scholarship).
>
> Now LiveCode, while bearing the mantle passed down through MetaCard of
> HyperCard, has pretensions to be more than
> a North American Programming Oddity (which is what HyperCard was), but a
> Programming Environment for every person,
> regardless of their nationality and native language.
>
> If LiveCode does not support non-ASCII writing systems and character sets
> (and Unicode is the de facto, even if not the de jure, standard)
> those pretensions will be seen to be nonsense.
>
> I cannot see any reason why, possibly with LCB, a parser could not be
> developed that would allow Chinese programmers to actually program
> in LiveCode WITHOUT having to learn LiveCode's "original" programming
> language, but by using something vaguely "Chinesey" (rather
> like LiveCode's vaguely Englishy current scripting language).
>
>
> Richmond.
>
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