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

4 points by briantmaurer 6 years ago | 5 comments

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?

pattusk 6 years ago |

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.

pattusk 6 years ago | |

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.

kasbah 6 years ago |

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

ejdo 6 years ago |

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

revi 6 years ago |

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

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