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Possible Duplicate:
Coding in Other (Spoken) Languages

When writing code, do people from other parts of the world have to use the English language keywords for code written in things like .NET, PHP, SQL, etc? Someone else actually asked me this and after a few minutes of thought, I was actually stumped. The question was specific to writing SQL but is there a general rule of thumb? If a Russian developer who doesn't speak English wants to write some SQL, do they need to learn the "FROM, ORDERBY" etc in English? Are there parsers or are these languages "locale aware"?

Community
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Pete
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  • Related to e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/202723/coding-in-other-spoken-languages, although I wouldn't call it a dupe. –  Nov 19 '10 at 15:49

1 Answers1

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People do not program in English. They program in a programming language.

Many of the popular languages use keywords taken from the English language, but you will see in many non-English countries variable names and comments that are in the native language.

So, someone may have to learn the keywords FROM and ORDER BY and understand their semantic meaning, but still have no idea about them being English (or how to pronounce them).

No modern language is localized in the manner you describe (i.e. parsers), so in effect, yes, they need to be learned in "English".

Oded
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