Whither Tango?
Nick Sabalausky
a at a.a
Sat Feb 20 07:17:55 PST 2010
"Justin Johansson" <no at spam.com> wrote in message
news:hlop1u$o1m$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Right, that's what I meant. Use a word starting with "retro-" when
>> talking to a english-speaking person, and even if they're uneducated,
>> they'll most likely have a good idea what is meant by that prefix.
>
> What about persons with English not as a first language?
>
I do realize that different native languages can be an issue, but at some
point a library has to use *some* language, and the established standard for
phobos just happens to be english. If we start banning terms from use in a
language or a library on the basis of whether a non-native english speaker
is likely to know it, then I suspect (though I admit that I don't know for
certain) you'd have to eliminate most of the given language/library because
there's no guarantee non-native speakers would know any of it.
For instance, if there were a russian-langauge library, and I tried to use
it, I wouldn't understand any of the words except nyet and da (and I'm not
even sure of the correct spellings of those - in either roman or cyrillic).
And I would be well aware that I wouldn't be able to assume I knew what
something did without a little digging. Of course, I certainly sympathize
that this can be a pain for non-native-english-speaking programmers, and
that it's an issue native english speaking programmers like me will probably
never be able to truly understand, but until we get to some hypothetcal
point in the future where everyone speaks the same language, then, again, at
some point there really is no choice but to just assume at least some
particular language.
Besides, computer terminology is already, at best, just a bunch of vague
meaphors anyway. When I started programing, it took me all of about a minute
to learn that "string" had nothing to do with the stuff cloth is made of and
stitched together with. And "SCSI" doesn't mean a damn thing at all, even to
an english speaker, but I still learned it quickly enough. So even if I
wasn't familiar with "retro" as anything other than "old style", I'm sure I
still could have gotten used to it very quickly, especially considering that
in 99.99% of contexts it's going to be pretty damn clear that it's not being
used to refer to bell-bottoms, chome appliances, and flock-of-seagulls
haircuts.
More information about the Digitalmars-d
mailing list