Whither Tango?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"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.