[DISCUSSION] Multilingual PHP

Submitted to the floor is a Wired article from 2 days ago I came across

https://www.wired.com/story/coding-is-for-everyoneas-long-as-you-speak-english/

The manual of PHP is translated into multiple languages - but what are the
development hurdles of the language itself being multilingual?

From what I understand of the compiler - maybe not that much. The language
requires an opening tag, so we could hook into that like this example for
Japanese

<?php[マニュアル]

A PHP opening tag with such a qualifier would change over all function
names and reserved words. Could these would be set on a per file basis?

The php.ini file could set the default language, the .htaccess file could
also on per directory.

I'll stop there cause I know there are problems I haven't thought of. And
I'm not going to argue the syntax I just kicked out from the top of my head
is the best either.

But I think it's worth the effort to at least look into the problem. Wired
has a point - people learn to code faster when they are working with their
own language. One of the stated goals of PHP's design has been
accessibility so this seems to be appropriate.

I yield the floor to those smarter and wiser than I.

The problem with this approach is that while it may become more readable
for the native speaker, it becomes pretty much impossible to read for the
rest of the world.
Having one single syntax for everyone allows all programmers in the world
to share code. I can't imagine a world where I'd find a library based on
Russian PHP on GitHub, that I can't contribute to or even understand (I
probably wouldn't use it).
English has the huge advantage to be quite simple to learn for basic
purposes, and it has a limited alphabet, composed only of ASCII letters.

I'm not a native English speaker but have never been bothered by keywords
being called IF and THEN, even when reading BASIC books as a child before
taking any English course at school.

This may be harder for people having a native language with a different
alphabet, though.

• Ben

Submitted to the floor is a Wired article from 2 days ago I came across

https://www.wired.com/story/coding-is-for-everyoneas-long-as-you-speak-english/

The manual of PHP is translated into multiple languages - but what are the
development hurdles of the language itself being multilingual?

From what I understand of the compiler - maybe not that much. The language
requires an opening tag, so we could hook into that like this example for
Japanese

<?php[マニュアル]

A PHP opening tag with such a qualifier would change over all function
names and reserved words. Could these would be set on a per file basis?

The php.ini file could set the default language, the .htaccess file could
also on per directory.

I'll stop there cause I know there are problems I haven't thought of. And
I'm not going to argue the syntax I just kicked out from the top of my head
is the best either.

But I think it's worth the effort to at least look into the problem. Wired
has a point - people learn to code faster when they are working with their
own language. One of the stated goals of PHP's design has been
accessibility so this seems to be appropriate.

I yield the floor to those smarter and wiser than I.

Hi!

I'll stop there cause I know there are problems I haven't thought of. And
I'm not going to argue the syntax I just kicked out from the top of my head
is the best either.

For better or for worse, English is the lingua franca of the internet
technology. You can, of course, create a compiler which would understand
keywords in other languages. This compiler will be used by 0.001% of the
main language user base, code written with it will be inaccessible to
any person who does not read that language, and communication between
the users of different language-branches of the project would be
virtually zero because they literally would have no common language. I
don't think this would help anyone. Yes, basic knowledge of English is
currently a requirement to engage with most technologies. Once you have
mastered it, however, the whole technology world is available to you, at
one-time investment. Fragmenting this world into tiny pieces, each with
its own language, would not make these parts more accessible to each other.

But I think it's worth the effort to at least look into the problem. Wired
has a point - people learn to code faster when they are working with their
own language. One of the stated goals of PHP's design has been

My native language is not English. Moreover, my first foreign language
wasn't English either. I had no more trouble learning BASIC (yes, I am
that old) or Pascal than I had learning programming languages based on
my native tongue. The only difference is that the former translated
pretty well into other languages I encountered when I progressed with my
learning, while the latter did not, it was an isolated island not
connected to anything else.

--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 12:17 AM Benjamin Morel benjamin.morel@gmail.com
wrote:

This may be harder for people having a native language with a different
alphabet, though.

That's unlikely to be a problem. Even to get to the PHP manual you have to
type www.php.net (or google.com if you want to google something),
so it implies you have a way to enter latin characters. Keyboard layout
switching is a problem solved decades ago.

--
Best regards,
Bruce Weirdan mailto:
weirdan@gmail.com

I also am old enough to have used/remember using BASIC. I remember German
and Japanese friends that wrote in BASIC. It was interesting to see German
programs where all the keywords were in English and all the text was in
German. The Japanese was even more strange as the system had to switch
between the code pages for ASCII/LATIN and the one for the Japanese
Language.

Today to get something other an ASCII/LATIN, we would have to support
Unicode for source code. Does PHP currently work if Unicode is used for
identifiers?

Walter

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 12:17 AM Benjamin Morel benjamin.morel@gmail.com
wrote:

This may be harder for people having a native language with a different
alphabet, though.

That's unlikely to be a problem. Even to get to the PHP manual you have to
type www.php.net (or google.com if you want to google something),
so it implies you have a way to enter latin characters. Keyboard layout
switching is a problem solved decades ago.

--
Best regards,
Bruce Weirdan mailto:
weirdan@gmail.com

--
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of
zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis

I also am old enough to have used/remember using BASIC. I remember German
and Japanese friends that wrote in BASIC. It was interesting to see German
programs where all the keywords were in English and all the text was in
German. The Japanese was even more strange as the system had to switch
between the code pages for ASCII/LATIN and the one for the Japanese
Language.

Today to get something other an ASCII/LATIN, we would have to support
Unicode for source code. Does PHP currently work if Unicode is used for
identifiers?

Yes. You can use UTF-8 for function names and variables (but please
don't!). My favourite annoyance is using a non breaking space in
function/method names ;-)

cheers,
Derick

My favourite annoyance is using a non breaking space in
function/method names ;-)

"Better" yet, you can use characters that are different, but look the
same as Latin chars
e.g. CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER ES (U+0441) instead of (LATIN SMALL LETTER C U+0063).
Incidentally these two chars also share the same physical button in
English/Russian keyboard layouts,
so it's a mistake easy to make and very hard to spot visually:
https://3v4l.org/rjjU9

--
Best regards,
Bruce Weirdan mailto:weirdan@gmail.com

Hi,

Submitted to the floor is a Wired article from 2 days ago I came
across

https://www.wired.com/story/coding-is-for-everyoneas-long-as-you-spea
k-english/

Oh, memories. Microsoft Office has (or had) localised macros. This lead
to many problems since localisaton depends on language installed and
macros from one don't work on the other ...

I don't believe the language itself should be translated. This limits
portability and there are just a few keywords.

If somebody wants to create localised libraries they can of course do
...

An area I would find interesting is error messages. To a little degree
we already have them localized:

$ php -r 'setlocale(LC_ALL, "de_DE");fopen("/etc/passwd", "w");'
PHP Warning:  fopen(/etc/passwd): failed to open stream: Keine
Berechtigung in Command line code on line 1

Expanding might be interesting, but it is not a trivial task, as this
might make error reporting (also suppressed one, i.e. deprecation
warnings) slower and it is a big translation and maintenance work and
has impact on support (I myself run my machines typically in English so
I can Google error messages and receive better results or can grep the
source for the origin)

johannes

The replies so far have been excellent and I do appreciate the time given
to write them. Being a lazy one-language American (I tried to learn Spanish
but I've forgotten most of what I learned out of lack of use) I'm not
familiar with the obstacles to learning English beyond "gittin rid my
accint" when I was real little.

Several of you brought up a counterpoint Wired hadn't considered - that
having a common language facilitates cooperation around the globe. Some
large projects like Drupal, WordPress, and PHP itself couldn't be
undertaken without a common tongue.

A colleague of mine at word pointed out that there are preprocessors out
there such as antlr that can translate the language of a file into the
tokens the compiler will recognize. It seems an adequate solution, but I
don't know for sure.

Still, an interesting discussion overall. Thanks.

Submitted to the floor is a Wired article from 2 days ago I came across

https://www.wired.com/story/coding-is-for-everyoneas-long-as-you-speak-english/

The manual of PHP is translated into multiple languages - but what are the
development hurdles of the language itself being multilingual?

From what I understand of the compiler - maybe not that much. The language
requires an opening tag, so we could hook into that like this example for
Japanese

<?php[マニュアル]

A PHP opening tag with such a qualifier would change over all function
names and reserved words. Could these would be set on a per file basis?

Interesting idea.
This may be good for kids to learn programming language.

PHP's parser is compatible with UTF-8, so code like this works.

[yohgaki@dev ~]$ cat t.php
<?php

$変数あ = 1234;
$変数い = 4567;

function 変数ダンプ(...$変数) {
var_dump(...$変数);
}

変数ダンプ($変数あ, $変数い);

[yohgaki@dev ~]$ php -n t.php
int(1234)
int(4567)

So if anyone would like to have translated function names/etc, may do

<?php
require_once 'translated_func_name_ja.php';

// USE translated function names/etc

Although this requires runtime overheads, i.e. additional function call,
it would be better to leave users if they prefer native names or not. IMO.

I'm not sure if bison/re2c supports UTF-8. If it does, translating keywords
such as "if"/"class",
should be easy task. It removes barrier for non English speaker kids and
would be good as
forked project.

Regards,

We (Russians) have got such experience already. The language is 1S where
syntax is Cyrillic. This kind of syntax doesn’t like even Russian patriots.

чт, 11 апр. 2019 г., 23:16 Benjamin Morel benjamin.morel@gmail.com:

The problem with this approach is that while it may become more readable
for the native speaker, it becomes pretty much impossible to read for the
rest of the world.
Having one single syntax for everyone allows all programmers in the world
to share code. I can't imagine a world where I'd find a library based on
Russian PHP on GitHub, that I can't contribute to or even understand (I
probably wouldn't use it).
English has the huge advantage to be quite simple to learn for basic
purposes, and it has a limited alphabet, composed only of ASCII letters.

I'm not a native English speaker but have never been bothered by keywords
being called IF and THEN, even when reading BASIC books as a child before
taking any English course at school.

This may be harder for people having a native language with a different
alphabet, though.

• Ben

Submitted to the floor is a Wired article from 2 days ago I came across

https://www.wired.com/story/coding-is-for-everyoneas-long-as-you-speak-english/

The manual of PHP is translated into multiple languages - but what are
the
development hurdles of the language itself being multilingual?

From what I understand of the compiler - maybe not that much. The
language
requires an opening tag, so we could hook into that like this example for
Japanese

<?php[マニュアル]

A PHP opening tag with such a qualifier would change over all function
names and reserved words. Could these would be set on a per file basis?

The php.ini file could set the default language, the .htaccess file could
also on per directory.

I'll stop there cause I know there are problems I haven't thought of. And
I'm not going to argue the syntax I just kicked out from the top of my
head
is the best either.

But I think it's worth the effort to at least look into the problem.
Wired
has a point - people learn to code faster when they are working with
their
own language. One of the stated goals of PHP's design has been
accessibility so this seems to be appropriate.

I yield the floor to those smarter and wiser than I.

My two cents on this, since I teach beginner courses on a regular basis:

All languages - that I'm aware of - have English as their basis. As a
matter of fact our industry as a whole have English as it's basis. I
often tell my students: learn English. You'll eventually need it and it
will provide you with a whole different view of all things as you'll
understand their meaning. You may argue it's unfair or even cruel, but
it is what it is.

So while I understand the reason behind this discussion - and am even
sympathetic towards it - it seems to be "Working on a problem that's not
really there". Aside from all this, wasn't this one of the downfalls of
PHP6?

Er Galvão Abbott
Development, Consulting and Teaching
https://www.galvao.eti.br/ | galvao@galvao.eti.br

Contributor and Evangelist, PHP galvao@php.net
Director, PHP Conference Brazil galvao@phpconference.com.br
Zend Framework Evangelist @ Roguewave Zend's ZTeam
Fedora Ambassador LATAM galvao@fedoraproject.org
Guest (Specialist) Post Graduation Professor

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 12:17 AM Benjamin Morel benjamin.morel@gmail.com
wrote:

This may be harder for people having a native language with a different
alphabet, though.

That's unlikely to be a problem. Even to get to the PHP manual you have to
type www.php.net (or google.com if you want to google something),
so it implies you have a way to enter latin characters. Keyboard layout
switching is a problem solved decades ago.