Re: Lua in other spoken languages?

[Pierre-Yves Gérardy <pygy79@...>]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 2:20 PM, Bertrand Mansion <lua@mamasam.net> wrote:
> I was trying to do some Lua programming with my son (in Love2D, a space invader game, he is 7) but I soon realized that the English keywords can make things more complex than necessary for a young French boy (same with other spoken languages).
>
> Do you know if attempts to translate Lua keywords/functions in other languages has been done already ? Or do you think this can be done and how could it be done then ?

Hello Bertrand,

I had programming courses at school when I was ten using both Logo
(translated in French) and Basica (the language in English, the error
messages may have been translated), and I don't think that having the
keywords and library functions (print, input, chr$, list, run, ...) in
English was problematic.

The programming languages are so constrained and arbitrary compared to
natural languages that it doesn't matter much wether you're useing
'for' and 'if' or 'repète' and 'si'... It may even make it easier to
have custom words for the well defined meaning of the terms rather
than using words that also make sense in other contexts.

We used letters for variable names so there wasn't any mismatch...

For Löve, you may want to translate the love.x.y names though, and
have him use French for naming his own fariables and functions. The
same goes for the Lua standard library ('require' -> 'demande',
'print' -> 'imprime', try to use verbs of the first group (in 'er') it
makes spelling simpler).

—Pierre-Yves