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NewsMicrosoft informs customers that Russian hackers spied on emails Pin
Kent Sharkey6hrs 44mins ago
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NewsWithholding Apple Intelligence from EU a ‘stunning declaration’ of anticompetitive behavior Pin
Kent Sharkey6hrs 44mins ago
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Kent Sharkey7hrs 14mins ago
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Kent Sharkey7hrs 14mins ago
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NewsEver put content on the web? Microsoft says that it's okay for them to steal it because it's 'freeware.' Pin
Kent Sharkey7hrs 14mins ago
staffKent Sharkey7hrs 14mins ago 
GeneralRe: Ever put content on the web? Microsoft says that it's okay for them to steal it because it's 'freeware.' Pin
David O'Neil6hrs 26mins ago
professionalDavid O'Neil6hrs 26mins ago 
NewsGoogle uses AI to add 110 new languages to Translate Pin
Kent Sharkey27-Jun-24 8:46
staffKent Sharkey27-Jun-24 8:46 
GeneralRe: Google uses AI to add 110 new languages to Translate Pin
MarkTJohnson27-Jun-24 9:15
professionalMarkTJohnson27-Jun-24 9:15 
GeneralRe: Google uses AI to add 110 new languages to Translate Pin
jochance27-Jun-24 9:44
jochance27-Jun-24 9:44 
GeneralRe: Google uses AI to add 110 new languages to Translate Pin
Kent Sharkey27-Jun-24 11:36
staffKent Sharkey27-Jun-24 11:36 
GeneralRe: Google uses AI to add 110 new languages to Translate Pin
Peter_in_278027-Jun-24 16:10
professionalPeter_in_278027-Jun-24 16:10 
GeneralRe: Google uses AI to add 110 new languages to Translate Pin
jochance28-Jun-24 7:12
jochance28-Jun-24 7:12 
GeneralRe: Google uses AI to add 110 new languages to Translate Pin
trønderen28-Jun-24 9:59
trønderen28-Jun-24 9:59 
jochance wrote:
For the insanity that was APL,
Actually, for many years after its introduction, APL wasn't a programming language at all. It was a matrix notation that math professor Kenneth Iverson used for the blackboard when lecturing matrix math at Harvard. Some of his computer friends suggested that maybe you could have a computer actually interpreting this notation.

For math operations, having a three-character symbol to denote an arbitrary inner product is extremely convenient - far more than a doubly nested loop with braces and loop control variables and termination conditions.

The 'insanity' lies in trying to use a hammer as a screwdriver. APL was never meant for developing text processing systems or virus scanners. (Yet you might be surprised by the variety of applications where APL actually is a suitable tool!)
jochance wrote:
Does anyone know if there are any programming languages which are explicitly non-English-language based?
There probably are a lot, but English-speaking programmers won't have heard of them. NIH Smile | :) [Sorry, David O'Neill...]

The MS Excel macro language was initially non-English based; it used function names defined by the language version of the Excel application creating it. So if you received a spreadsheet with macros from a source in another language speaking community, the spreadsheet was useless. Quite early (I guess it was in the jump from version 2 to 6, but correct me if I am wrong) the symbolic identifiers were internally replaced with binary IDs, to be mapped to the language of the actual user in the UI. (Hear! Hear! ... How many of you can, honest to some deity, say that you never the last ten years wrote a UI related text string into your source code? Smile | :) )

Some languages are explicitly defined by 'abstract' tokens. Mapping these onto concrete tokens is left to separate documents, quite similar to some libraries with 'bindings' to several programming languages. Algol68 was one of those. I have seen Algol68 source code in German. I know enough German to recognize all the reserved words (but not all of the variable names and the comments Smile | :) ).

In my student days, we made a simple Pascal preprocessor, allowing us to program in Norwegian (we even chose the 'New Norwegian' variant, based on West Norway dialects): All the preprocessor did was replacing any occurrence of MEDAN...GJER with WHILE...DO, BOLK with PROCEDURE, OM...SÅ with IF...THEN, BYRJ...STOGG with BEGIN...END and so on. This obviously introduced a whole new set of reserved words, but we required them to be in upper case. Pascal casing for all user defined symbols was as established coding practice, so it caused no real problems.

Symbol recognition of keywords happens in the very, very first part of the compilation, in the scanner / tokenizer. Making a different source code language hardly affects the compilator at all. You may not be able to adapt to an arbitrary language, at least not in a 'natural' way, if the structure of the abstract language has a structure different from the desired source language. E.g. Pascal has a distinct token (THEN) separating a condition and an action; C does not. If the desired language never uses any such separator, then requiring source to have it makes it look artificial. But if the grammar does not specify any separator while the desired language always requires one, a source statement may appear to the reader as incomplete. (Of course you could introduce a keyword that parses to nothing, but I and many others dislike such solutions!)
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.

GeneralRe: Google uses AI to add 110 new languages to Translate Pin
jochance28-Jun-24 10:11
jochance28-Jun-24 10:11 
GeneralRe: Google uses AI to add 110 new languages to Translate Pin
jochance8hrs 11mins ago
jochance8hrs 11mins ago 
GeneralRe: Google uses AI to add 110 new languages to Translate Pin
Kent Sharkey7hrs 55mins ago
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Kent Sharkey27-Jun-24 8:46
staffKent Sharkey27-Jun-24 8:46 
GeneralRe: Half of IT pros think there are devices on their network they don't know about Pin
Nelek28-Jun-24 6:35
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NewsOpen source 'Eclipse Theia IDE' exits beta to challenge Visual Studio Code Pin
Kent Sharkey27-Jun-24 8:31
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NewsWindows 10 will get five years of additional support thanks to 0patch Pin
Kent Sharkey27-Jun-24 7:46
staffKent Sharkey27-Jun-24 7:46 

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