Kickstarter 2013 Revisited

[Richmond]

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.