Paul Keinanen wrote:
> If the design is in Finnish which refer to some existing local
> entities, it is much easier to use the the original name for an entity
> than try to translate the name to English (and two programmers would
> come up with different translations :-).
and John Cowan responded:
> This is an extremely important point.
Later, Patrick Andries wrote:
> I believe you will agree with me that we still need to accept some
> "older" Germanic words as identifiers (e.g. »Städte«, »Österreich«,
> »Fußball«, »Länder«, »Kärnten«, etc.). Or should Austrian application
> programmers and analysts developping a local application translate in
> English all the intuitive concepts used in their object-oriented
> world ? These older Germanic words might in fact be much more frequent
> in identifiers that the "newer" ones.
I have been working for the past year on an application for medical
laboratory quality control in Germany. The German government has a
very detailed set of requirements for QC in medical labs, different from
that used in any other country (although it may spread to the rest of
Europe in the future).
Terms like "maximal zulässige Abweichung" (maximum allowable deviation)
and its abbreviation, "mzA," have a very specific meaning in this
context, and although I do not speak German, I have found it much more
convenient to use the native German names for these concepts than to
translate them into English, both in discussion and in C variable names.
Keeping the German name ensures that the specific meaning is retained.
On those occasions when I want to use one of these native German terms
as a variable name, such as "Meßart," and I can't because it contains a
diacritical mark which C doesn't allow, I just shrug and call the
variable "Messart" instead. I can see how this might be extremely
annoying if I had to do it frequently.
My personal opinion is that programming languages should allow non-
ASCII, non-Latin characters in variable names, and it should be the
responsibility of *each company or programming group* to establish its
own in-house standards. In other words, if Torsten wants everyone at
Sharmahd to write in ASCII and English, that is his right and may be a
good in-house policy; but to say that the language should forbid anyone
from doing otherwise sounds excessive.
-Doug
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT