[sugar] Multilingual programming

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Hello,

Ian Bicking wrote:
> 
> Alan Kay wrote:
> > Some examples in Etoys of Multilingual programming. Besides the Japanese 
> > version shown here, some students in Japan have done a better one that 
> > also uses Japanese syntax (this turns out to help many young children, 
> > as one might expect). The Spanish one is particularly good as it has had 
> > the useful pressure of being used heavily in Spain.
> 
> How possible is it to translate the code automatically (just to expose 
> the children to the English forms)?  Logo doesn't really try to adapt to 
> any syntax, I think -- or maybe it just happens to be vaguely English 
> and I don't notice it.

  I'm not sure anybody responded to this... but the graphical tiles
are elements in a syntactically correct parsed tree (D&D ensures that
only correct and type safe parse tree can be constructed), and each
tile can know where it came from, translating them is doable.  In
fact, in current Etoys, it just happens when you switch the language.

  Of course, user-defined names are different story.  There is no
reliable way to translate them, and we leave them as they are.

  In the current Etoys system there are some issues; some tiles don't
really remember where they came from (I.e., either if it was defined
by the user or not) and sometimes wrongly translated when they
shouldn't.  Also, if you change the type of a variable that is already
in use, you can make the parse tree type-unsafe.  If such a script
gets executed, the system notifies the user in a relatively gentle way
and the user have a chance to fix it.

-- Yoshiki