HACKER Q&A
📣 briantmaurer

Is all software written with the latin alphabet?


I know many languages allow variable names using UTF-8 characters, but are there any programming languages where the language's reserved words (if / then / else / function / class / etc.) are not in english or the latin alphabet?

  👤 pattusk Accepted Answer ✓
This classical chinese programming language was posted here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22213406 I know that the ussr developed a cyrillic based programming language (on my phone now so can't find an exact source). Early ODRA computers from Poland used the latin alphabet but instructions were nonetheless from polish rather than English.

Would love to hear about other cases.

👤 kasbah
You can use Unicode symbols in GHC Haskell for e.g. λ. Then there's APL of course which also re-uses a lot of ancient Greek and other symbols that these days would most likely be in Unicode.

https://wiki.haskell.org/Unicode-symbols

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

👤 ejdo
Piet comes to mind, but it's not exactly a "serious" language: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet

Esolang also has a category for Chinese/Japanese/Korean languages: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Category:CJK And one for non-textual languages: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Category:Non-textual

👤 revi
Not an 'ordinary' language, but maybe aheui[1] fits in?

[1]: https://aheui.readthedocs.io/ko/latest/specs.en.html