Ask HN: Is all software written with the latin alphabet?

#1

Post by briantmaurer » Mon, Feb 10, 2020, 11:54 PM UTC

I know many languages allow variable names using UTF-8 characters, but are there any programming languages where the language's reserved words (if / then / else / function / class / etc.) are not in english or the latin alphabet?

Re: Ask HN: Is all software written with the latin alphabet?

#2

Post by pattusk » Tue, Feb 11, 2020, 12:01 AM UTC

This classical chinese programming language was posted here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22213406 I know that the ussr developed a cyrillic based programming language (on my phone now so can't find an exact source). Early ODRA computers from Poland used the latin alphabet but instructions were nonetheless from polish rather than English.

Would love to hear about other cases.

Re: Ask HN: Is all software written with the latin alphabet?

#3

Post by pattusk » Tue, Feb 11, 2020, 12:03 AM UTC

pattusk wrote: post #2

This classical chinese programming language was posted here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22213406 I know that the ussr developed a cyrillic based programming language (on my phone now so can't find an exact source). Early ODRA computers from Poland used the latin alphabet but instructions were nonetheless from polish rather than English. Would love to hear about other cases.

Turns out wikipedia has a page on this issue: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programmin... I'm sure it's not comprehensive though.

Re: Ask HN: Is all software written with the latin alphabet?

#4

Post by revi » Tue, Feb 11, 2020, 12:03 AM UTC

Not an 'ordinary' language, but maybe aheui[1] fits in?

[1]: https://aheui.readthedocs.io/ko/latest/specs.en.html

Re: Ask HN: Is all software written with the latin alphabet?

#5

Post by ejdo » Tue, Feb 11, 2020, 12:13 AM UTC

Piet comes to mind, but it's not exactly a "serious" language: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet

Esolang also has a category for Chinese/Japanese/Korean languages: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Category:CJK And one for non-textual languages: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Category:Non-textual

Re: Ask HN: Is all software written with the latin alphabet?

#6

Post by kasbah » Tue, Feb 11, 2020, 12:39 AM UTC

You can use Unicode symbols in GHC Haskell for e.g. λ. Then there's APL of course which also re-uses a lot of ancient Greek and other symbols that these days would most likely be in Unicode.

https://wiki.haskell.org/Unicode-symbols

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4