>>>>> "Neil" == Neil Hodgson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Neil> Most variable names were poorly chosen with s, p, q, fla
Neil> (boolean=flag) and flafla being popular. When I asked some
Neil> Japanese coders why they didn't use Japanese words expressed
Neil> in ASCII (Romaji), their response was that it was a really
Neil> weird idea.
That may be due to the fact that two-ideograph words will often have a
dozen homonyms, and sometimes several dozen. I sometimes use kanji in
not-for-general-distribution Emacs LISP code when 2 kanji will give as
expressive an identifier as 10 or 15 ASCII characters.
Neil> This is anecdotal but it appears to me that transliterations
Neil> are not commonly used apart from learning languages
In everyday usage, they're used a lot for identifier-like purposes
like corporate logos.
The only large corpuses of Japanese-oriented Japanese-authored code
I'm familiar with are the input methods Wnn, Canna, and SKK, and these
invariably use transliterated Japanese grammatical terms for parser
components[1], although there are perfectly good equivalents in English,
at least (I think they may actually be standardized by the Ministry of
Education).
There's also an Emacs library, edict.el, that uses _mixed_
ASCII-hiragana-kanji identifiers. (ISTR that was done just to prove a
point---the person who wrote it was an American, I
believe---definitely not Japanese.)
Footnotes:
[1] Japanese does not require word delimiters, so input methods must
have grammatical knowledge to choose among large numbers of homonyms.
--
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
ask what your business can "do for" free software.
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