Lev Minkovsky:
> I would imagine the right approach for this to happen is to ask ourselves: what is are the specific characters that we wish were in the basic character set?

I don't really see any other way than just mandating Unicode. As far as
I understand the only reason there are still mess of all the
implementation defined charsets is z/OS with its EBCDIC. And you're not
gonna add those characters to EBCDIC.

> The second, far more impactful idea would be to unicodize the entire language and let the users use keywords in their national languages. Programmers outside USA (surprise, surprise) often think in their native languages and often prefer to write comments in the For example, I know that the SAP codebase is full of comments in German.
A source file is a specialized text, and every language switch is a
disorienting experience, especially if these languages are not related.
Algol 68 designers already understood this and translated the language
into Russian, German, French, Bulgarian, Chinese and Japanese, including
of course the keywords. This could facilitate teaching/studying the
language as well.

I think the only reason not to use English is politics. By using English
we are able to escape our local culture and use something shared and
understood (even if thinking about English language really brings mostly
ideas of colonialism, monarchy, slavery and racism, but that is the
compromise we all agreed upon a long time ago).

> I would imagine that for most if not all of you, the third example looks like gibberish.

My native tongue is (unfortunately) Russian and I still (unfortunately)
live in Russia yet the third example looks like gibberish to me. When I
was 8 years old, I programmed in BASIC on a Soviet programmable
calculator in English and it was perfectly fine.

In fact, I love that I never have to use Russian in my code. The English
language reputation may be bad enough but thinking about Russian brings
only ideas of fascism, genocide and hatred towards your neighbor. I'd
rather not think about that.

Besides, for any software developer living in Russian speaking country
the only path forward is to emigrate to US/Canada/Europe/Australia. I'm
pretty sure you know that. Russian language is therefore a complete
waste of time.

I'm disabled and my pension is 4000$/year. That's not enough to buy
food. I have to rely on my parents to help me. I can't change my legal
gender because Russian laws are extremely hostile and I have to suffer
having wrong gender on my documents. I can't marry my wife because
Russia doesn't have same-sex marriage so for legal reasons she's a
foreign person to me. And:

> Some of them may even be reluctant to enter a career where they would have to deal with pages and pages of such stuff on a daily basis.

Really? I would never program in C++ if it had anything like Russian
keywords in it. I suffer enough from Russia. No, thank you.


Well, that was emotional. I thought I could escape my pain on this
mailing list...