Philosophical debate on language leads to question

Per the ICAO, English is required language for Air Traffic Controllers, pilots must be able to converse in English to request clearances, etc.

http://www.icao.int/Pages/default.aspx

indeed but France has filed a difference
so all comms between French ATC and French pilots is in French
buggers up the situational awareness
they will talk English to an English pilot
but you miss half of what's going on

now Germany is different
I flew from UK to Denmark, through German airspace
when I first dialled in the German ATC everyone was talking German
uh oh
made my first call in English

it all went dead quiet
you could almost hear people changing gear
then everyone (pilots as well) continued in pefect English!

wunderbah!

Think that happens world wide.
Can hear some reeeally heavily accented English flying thru/over/around New York City controlled airspace!

What are you flying? I need to get back up in my Cessna 177 again. I work at an airbase, no excuse not to fly in vs 45 minute drive!

I'm not so sure all German's like the situation

A Pan Am 727 waiting for start clearance in Munich overheard the following:

Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?"
Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English."
Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"
Unknown voice from another plane (in a British accent): "Because you lost the bloody war!"

But I'm from Belgium and I have read some "french and dutch code". My advice: "don't go there".
There have been languages that have translated to local languages or were/are available in localized versions. For instance excel converts your formula's to local language (settings). But also other more professional languages have tried it.
In general they become popular locally but hardly get "world sized" for the obvious reason of code reuse.
What could I do with code from a Chinese if it were in Chinese?
Don't forget that appart from the words there is also the formatting issue 1,000 and 1.000 in Belgium is 1.000 and 1,000 in USA. If you ever copied excel formula's from the internet and it didn't work, this was very likely to be the cause?
Would you like to copy and adapt

Voor(KlantID =0, KlantID < AantalKlanten,KlantID++) {drukAf(KlantID).}

to

for(CustomerID =0; CustomerID < NumberOfCustomers; CustomerID ++) {print(CustomerID );}

Best regards
Jantje

CrossRoads:
Think that happens world wide.
Can hear some reeeally heavily accented English flying thru/over/around New York City controlled airspace!

What are you flying? I need to get back up in my Cessna 177 again. I work at an airbase, no excuse not to fly in vs 45 minute drive!

:slight_smile: didn't realise you flew too!
should have guessed from your earlier post

I fly an AA5 Tiger, full airways, IR

Jantje:
....
For instance excel converts your formula's to local language (settings). Best regards
...

Jantje

I hate.. HATE that.... makes working at another location a b***h... because excell also manages to NOT recognise the other languages... you can't use ROOT for example on a non-english PC, and I know that a root is "wortel" in Dutch, but I have no idea what it is in german or french... let alone the more complex functions

( also LOL@"because you lost the war")

Reminds me of an old joke:

What do you call a person that can speak two languages?
Answer, bilingual.
What do you call a person that can speak three languages?
Answer, trilingual.
What do you call a person that can speak only one language?
Answer, American.

Lefty

@lefty--how true it is!

tomperdarwin:
Are there compilers that work in other languages ?

i mean, as far as I know, C language (and every other programming language I 've encountered) is basically English. And a rapid search with the help of our googly friends didn't tell me more.

All they have to do is a cut and paste from English to another language concerning the commands of any language.

Compilers are lexographic translators, the do not working in "English", it just so happens that some of the lexographic symbols 'resemble' English words.
Much of the language has its basis in mathematics.

Whilst you may say " for (int loop=0; loop<8; loop++)" ,it is no more English than "Typhoon" ???? or "Sampan" (??).
For it to be English then you should be looking at:

Can you please loop round the following:
......
whilst the count is less than 8.

HC

Under that logic everything typed that does not conform to the exact rules of the language, ceases to be english.

consider : " I ARE A CAT " is not english , sure lexographically teh words are all english, but as a sentence it isn't.

( and that typo in 'the' ruins my sentence too, as does lack of capitalising and puntucation )

INT ( eger ), FOR, LOOP, WHILE, and so on are all english words... that's the point

Changing keywords/reserved words in a programming to match the native language is relatively simple, but imagine, for instance, COBOL in German, with the verb at the end! :smiley:

AWOL:
Changing keywords/reserved words in a programming to match the native language is relatively simple, but imagine, for instance, COBOL in German, with the verb at the end! :smiley:

I once worked with a guy who figured out how to modify the symbol table in the CDC COBOL compiler so that his most frequent typos would still work. This was just for fun, of course, because you don't send code to production with 'perfrom' instead of 'perform' scattered here and there. Hmmm, might have been under VMS -- we were using both, and that was back in the early 80s, so I don't remember the gory details.

I've wondered about that for a while, but in the end I think it doesn't make a huge difference, if you speak English natively or not. Even for English speakers, C initially looks pretty obscure, for example:

^      exclusive or
%      modulus
++     add 1 to itself
--     subtract 1 from itself
&      bitwise and
|      bitwise or
&&     logical and
||     logical or
~      negate  (plus destructor)
{ }    group stuff into a block
!      not <something>
< >    templates
#xx    some obscure compiler directive
\xx    some "escape" sequence
void   huh?
int    a number?
char   a letter?

It's not as if a native English speaker can pick up C++ code and just know exactly what it means. And for non-English speakers, they just have to add a few more things to the list, like "if" and "while". And even English speakers have to learn stuff like "if (a = b)" won't work as you expect.

Even mathematicians have big problems with C x = x + 1; is clearly nonsense!

Just subtract x from both sides, AWOL, then it becomes clearer:

0 = 1

Oh, wait ...

No problem, at that point you just multiply both sides by a number that allows you to get an engineering estimate where boths sides have a common numerator ....

0 * 0 = 0 * 1

Problem solved. :slight_smile:

I find software humor void().