Question

This is something I’ve always wondered, and I can’t find any mention of it anywhere online. When a shop from, say Japan, writes code, would I be able to read it in English? Or do languages, like C, PHP, anything, have Japanese translations that they write?

I guess what I’m asking is does every single coder in the world know enough English to use the exact same reserved words I do?

Would this code:

If (i < size){     switch         case 1:             print 'hi there'         default:             print 'no, thank you' } else {     print 'yes, thank you' } 

display the exact same as I’m seeing it right now in English, or would some other non-English-speaking person see the words ‘if’, ‘switch’, ‘case’, ‘default’, ‘print’, and ‘else’ in their native language?

EDIT – yes, this is serious. I didn’t know if different localizations of a language have different keywords. or if there are even different localizations at all.

Answer 1

If I understood well the question actually is: "does every single coder in the world know enough English to use the exact same reserved words as I do?"

Well.. English is not the subject here but programming language reserved words. I mean, when I started about 10 yrs ago, I didn’t have any clue of English, and still I was able to program simple things by learning the programming language, even when I did not know what they meant ( in English ). As a matter of fact this helped me to learn English.

For example. I know to do an "iteración" ( iteration of course ) I had to write:

 for( i = 0 ; i < 100 ; i++ ) {} 

To me, the "for", the ";" and the "++" were simple foreign words or symbols. Later I learned that "for" meant "para", "while" meant "mientras", etc. But, in the meantime, I did not need to know English, what I needed was to know was "C".

Of course when I needed to learn more things, I had to learn English, for the documentation is written in that language.

So the answer is: No, I don’t see if, while, for etc. in my native language. I see them in English, but they didn’t mean to me any other thing that they meant for the programming language in turn.

Is like switch statement in bash: case .. esac. What Is "esac"… for me the end of the switch statement in bash.

I guess that’s what we call "abstraction"