GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 436951
Transparent two-way translation of programming languages to non-English keywords
Last modified: 2008-02-18 20:59:45 UTC
The idea is to let non-english speakers edit programs in their own language, while still saving the file in the actual (English-based) programming language. Language-specific keywords, such as "if", would be translated on-screen, but stay English on-disk. Variable and function names that clashed with keywords on either side could be escaped by some simple (alpha-only) convention on the other side. For instance, if someone Danish wanted to name a variable "else" after their mother not realizing that "else" is a keyword in English, the variable could be saved to disk as dans_else; while an on-disk variable named "si" would show on a Spanish user's screen as "engl_si". This would be a great boon, particularly to educators in other languages - rudimentary if-then-else English can be a job requirement for pro programmers, but not so much for elementary and middle school pre-programming classes. Obviously, existing codebase would not be translated - just the basic keywords of the language. A right-click facility could show the original keyword in case you needed to search documentation or whatever. This feature request is pretty big, operationally, though it's not bigger than many existing features; but conceptually, it is huge. Big and "paradigm-shifting" enough to possibly warrant even including it in a special, renamed version of BlueFish (I can think of another famous fish who'd be the other parent of this baby...) I'm submitting this bug to see if the idea has support. I'm also going to link to this bug from other places to gather support here for this idea. If some current Bluefish developer is interested, I'd be willing to help with the work - but I'm not up to taking the lead.
The goal for Bluefish is to build a very generic editor with powerful features for as many languages as possible. Implementing this is not really helping that goal, and it will be very difficult for many languages. A second problem is that Bluefish developers already struggle to keep up with the feature demand. So there's nobody with the time to work on this enhancement. Both reasons together make me close the request. I would advise you to search for a project that has more relations with education (or at least an editor for a single programming language), and that has more development time.