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[Walter Bright]

Roberto Mariottini wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> [...]
>> Yes. I suppose we could invent a name, like frzapper instead, but I 
>> don't think that would help.
> 
> I think it may help.
> 
> In my experience adding new keywords is often less painful than it 
> seems. For example Java added the (probably unneeded) keywords 'extends' 
> and 'implements' without creating a single problem. No programmer coming 
> from C or C++ have had any problems with 'extends' and 'implements'.

Well, I did, simply because 'extends' was annoying to type, where C++ 
simply used ':'.


> On the other side, changing the meaning of a well known keyword can be 
> very painful: it's still difficult to figure out that 'long' in Java 
> means a 64 bit integer.

It's a little silly to have 'int' and 'long' both mean 32 bits.


> P.S.: I'm not a native English speaker, and I've learned programming 
> without knowing a word of English.
> I can assure you that even if 'while', 'for', 'read', 'float', 'thread' 
> were unknown words for me, I've learned their meaning anyways.
> Imagine also a Japanese or Chinese programmer: for her even 'integer' 
> means nothing (so I was lucky!). Still there are millions of Japanese 
> and Chinese programmers.
> And 'long', 'short', 'double', 'float', have lost their original English 
> meaning long ago.

Sure. At some level it's pointless to keep the original English meanings 
because the whole reason we have programming languages instead of 
English is because English is ambiguous and imprecise. Every computer 
language has to invent its own meanings.