On 10/28/05, Neil Hodgson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I used to work on software written by Japanese and English speakers > at Fujitsu with most developers being Japanese. The rules were that > comments could be in Japanese but identifiers were only allowed to > contain ASCII characters. Most variable names were poorly chosen with > s, p, q, fla (boolean=flag) and flafla being popular. When I asked > some Japanese coders why they didn't use Japanese words expressed in > ASCII (Romaji), their response was that it was a really weird idea. > > This is anecdotal but it appears to me that transliterations are > not commonly used apart from learning languages and some minimal help > for foreigners such as including transliterated names on railway > station name boards.
Israeli programmers generally use English identifiers but transliterations are common for local business terminology: types of financial instruments, tax and insurance terminology, employee benefit plans etc. Yes, it looks weird, but it would be rather pointless to try to translate them. Even native English speakers would find it difficult to recognize the translations because they are used to using them as loan words. Only transliteration (or possibly the use of non-ASCII identifiers) would make sense in this situation and I do not think it is unique to Israel. BTW, I heard about a Cobol shop that had an explicit policy of using only transliterated identifiers. This resulted in a much smaller chance of hitting one of Cobol's numerous reserved words. Thankfully, this is not an issue in Python... Oren _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
