Are There Any Chinese Programming Languages?

[davesgonechina]

As far as I know, there has never been a programming language (HTML, PHP, C, Java) that solely uses Chinese characters instead of the Latin alphabet. Could there be?

In some ways, a Chinese programming language could be really efficient. I found this posting over at MIT giving some reasons why Chinese might be useful for a recursive language like Scheme. The author points out that, besides being useful for hundreds of millions of Chinese speakers and be a point of pride, but also thinks that radicals and the terseness of Chinese would be rather efficient.

Do you think the Latin alphabet gives a level of flexibility to programming that would be difficult to replicate with Chinese characters, or would this be a non-issue?

[-(Shell)-]

Dont they use a latin keyboard anyways? I thought when you type chinese text you use a special program where you write the word in the pinyin then it shows you the symbol? If so I dont think it would make a differnce, its just going to be a waste of time for the programmer. Correct me if im wrong.

[davesgonechina]

yeah, QWERTY keyboards and a pinyin converter. I'm not exactly talking about the input method, I'm more curious about whether or not there are structural advantages or disadvantages to using a character based language as opposed to an alphabet based language to create a programming language. While they'd still have to type out pinyin to get a character, you might end up with few lines of code (one character representing something that would take five or six Latin letters) and a Chinese programmer wouldn't have to learn terminology in a foreign language - just terminology in Chinese. That might actually make it faster for them. That's why I'm curious if anyone has ever seen, heard or spoken to any Chinese programmers about this kinda stuff.

[rmontelatici]

I don't think you can go anywhere with this idea (I mean, from the programming or efficiency point of view). The MIT guys aren't enthusiastic either.

A programming language has a syntax and a semantics. You won't create a new programming paradigm by coming up with a new syntax proposal.

As for syntax itself, I do not see the advantages of using chinese characters. Of course, you could use terse characters in place of several-latin-characters-tokens, but for which benefit ? Program structuration is the important part and I don't see what chinese characters could bring new to it.

Programs are structured, and yes, that's true, chinese characters are structured, but this is not the same kind of structuration. The combinatorics of chinese characters is way less complex. You cannot express an algorithm with a character, therefore in your programming language chinese characters would play the same role as letters or tokens in an english program.

Writing a program with chinese characters in place of english keywords would merely bring builtin program obfuscation for all non-chinese readers, that's it !

[geraldc]

I once read a report on how icons in a GUI were basically modern versions of ideograms. So although the written language isn't used is programming, there are similarities between Chinese characters and icons in the user interface.