Am 25.02.10 20:27, schrieb Luca:
Chris Rebert wrote:
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:26 AM, Luca <lu...@despammed.com> wrote:
Hello, i am trying to develop an application to teach programming to
young
kids in a similar way as Logo did in the past. I would like to use an
embedded Python as underlying language but this raises a problem.
The target of my app are very young kids that might be unfamiliar with
english, so i am wondering if there is a way to rename/redefine
identifiers
and messages in the language of the kid.
In UCB-Logo this is very easy with the command
COPYDEF "newidentifier "oldidentifier
so all you have to do is setup a startup script to redefine all the
identifiers to the language of the user.
Is there anything similar for python? Since python would be embedded it
would not be a problem for me to do it through some API.
It can certainly be done (c.f. ChinesePython -
http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english.html),
but I know of no framework that simplifies the task. Essentially, you
just have to manually modify Python's parser by swapping out the
english for the other language (and if you want to mess with the basic
types' names, their name definitions somewhere else too). There also
might be encoding issues to deal with.
Cheers,
Chris
--
http://blog.rebertia.com
Yes, i am playing with Python source code, i have changed some keywords
but the compile-process fails when it tries to compile some of python
libraries which, of course, use english keywords... so i guess this is
not a very clean/viable solution (without having to rewrite several
parts of the libraries). A better solution could be to "duplicate"
keywords adding a translated version but leaving the original version in
place so that every module keeps working. In few words, if i was going
to translate the keyword "if" in, say, italian "se", then i would have
both "if" and also "se" working at the same time, in the same manner.
I think that the best way to do this is to insert a "filter" somewhere
that converts every "se" keyword into a "if" keyword so that python
doesn't even see the change.
What i would like to do is add a new keyword (lets call it "copydef"
like in UCBLogo or whatever) that does this work at runtime by keeping a
substitution table in RAM. If i could manage to add this new keyword to
python then it would be easy to write a startup script that translates
the keywords once python is "up and running" and without breaking
existing python programs/libraries (unless the new keyword conflicts
with functions defined inside these programs/libraries).
You could use import-hooks for importing your code. There was a
python-magazine article a while ago that showed how to use that + a
parser to import seamlessly a DSL.
Using pyparsing to write a python-grammar on the fly that simply
exchanges the keywords before passing it to the interpreter is also easy.
But to be honest: I doubt it's worth the effort. Really. Teaching people
how to code, but in something that is *not* the "real" language is of
little, if any, benefit.
And also I don't think that your concerns are valid in general. Keywords
are like brandnames or other things - the stand for a concept, and
people immediatly accept them when they want them.
Much, much, much more important would - if anything - be a
standard-library, or a wrapper for that, e.g. for turtle-graphics, that
was written in terms of your desired language.
Diez
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