JimG 20050425
I am just starting to learn Tcl. Find it's fun when using Chinese Characters.
puts "The next line is in Chinese. Since we don't
use blank space to separate words, {}s and \"s are not needed!"
puts 中文不用空格来分词，所以句子不需要用引号或者大括号。
set cs 白日依山尽，黄河入海流。欲穷千里目，中文更自由。
puts [string replace $cs end-5 更上一层楼。]It's interesting.
There're others to come...
KJN 2005-05-20
Non-ASCII characters are first-class citizens in Tcl (unlike other languages which "support" Unicode as a kind of optional extra). Tcl is therefore a very good foundation for programming in languages other than English. Variables and commands can be named with non-ASCII characters, for example:
set 子 需要用 puts $子
works just fine. Tcl lets you rename and alias commands, so you can also say
interp alias {} 用 {} puts
用 $子If you wish, you could hide the "English" commands by renaming them:
rename puts oldputs
interp alias {} 用 {} oldputs
用 $子You can do this in a systematic way, by moving the English commands into a namespace.
With just an hour's work, it would be possible to translate every Tcl command into a different natural language. Command options are more difficult, but could be translated in a substitute command that then calls the "real" command. The most difficult problem is with error messages: is there an easy way to modify the error messages that Tcl sends? If so, English could be completely replaced with an arbitrary natural language.