Can Basic be bilingual?

[DonH]

I tried to transfer Greek letters into a Basic program, but found this
impossible, as all were automatically converted into their English
equivalent.
Windows itself has no problem, but Basic must be unilingual - being at a
primitive level?
Or, is it just that I don't know the technique?

[Karl E. Peterson]

DonH pretended :

No where near enough information here.

You don't even say what "Basic" language you're using. If it's VB6,
you might find http://www.i18nwithvb.com/ worth a peek.

--
.NET: It's About Trust!
http://vfred.mvps.org

[DonH]

"Karl E. Peterson" <ka...@exmvps.org> wrote in message
news:jl2g3v$2b9$1...@dont-email.me...

# I use MS-QBasic, under Windows (DOS), and find it quite satisfactory.
The bilingual endeavour was only a casual attempt, and of no real
concern - as Windows itself, and WWWeb, can accommodate.
I suppose that even at relatively primitive Basic level, the additional
characters of, eg Cyrillic or Germanic alphabets, could be covered if the
ASCII (American!) binaries were expanded.
Presumably, Basic in non-English nations is entirely in their language -
but that is not bilingual.

[Karl E. Peterson]

DonH formulated the question :

> # I use MS-QBasic, under Windows (DOS), and find it quite satisfactory.
> The bilingual endeavour was only a casual attempt, and of no real concern
> - as Windows itself, and WWWeb, can accommodate.
> I suppose that even at relatively primitive Basic level, the additional
> characters of, eg Cyrillic or Germanic alphabets, could be covered if the
> ASCII (American!) binaries were expanded.
> Presumably, Basic in non-English nations is entirely in their language -
> but that is not bilingual.

Hmmm, well, that /is/ a DOS application, so you need to look at
"ancient" things like codepages and such to do that. DOS is very
limited, as I recall, to 256 characters at a time. Sorry I can't offer
better advice. It's been nearly a quarter century since I had to mess
with that stuff.

[ralph]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2012 06:54:30 +1100, "DonH" <donlhu...@bigpond.com>
wrote:

There are such character sets/mappings, for example, Latin-1. But that
would hardly resolve the issue.

A few exotic attempts have been made to create 'bilingual' or
'localized' programming languages , however, those were mostly just
scripting front-ends for a 'single language' compiler (ie, a
pre-pre-processor) and pretty much a failure. This excludes those
attempts where a parser/compiler is converted to another language. For
example, there are Russian and Chinese versions of BASIC - but they
would be as mystified with English as your QBasic is with Greek.

In general no such a thing exists in programming. The main problem is
Keywords and Libraries. Imagine the complexity that would be
introduced if ...
SI(...)
SE(...)
AV(...)
IF(...)
may or may not be indicating an "If" block.

What if a Spanish programmer passed his source code across the border
to his Portuguese buddy for additional coding, who then passed it on
to England? You would then have code full of SI(...), IF(...), and
SE(...) blocks all meaning the same thing. Not only would the number
of Keywords and Library name space expand but the code itself would
turn into a jumbled mess.

Not to mention the fact that choices for creating a non-keyword
variable would decrease considerably. <g>

-ralph

[Hector Alfaro]

In the qbasic online help there is an ascii table with all the available
characters in your current codepage.

On a real DOS environment you can change codepage but not sure on windows.

Try yabasic, libertybasic, lbb, they are similar languages with new
features that run as real windows applications.

[DonH]

"Hector Alfaro" <alfa...@ceropublicidad.com> wrote in message
news:jl5lfa$ei6$1...@speranza.aioe.org...

# Thanks.
=========================
CLS
REM ==================================================
REM Greek Letters occur, as ASCII characters:
REM ==================================================
DIM a$(224 TO 240), b$(224 TO 240), c$(3 TO 6)
FOR n = 224 TO 240
a$(n) = CHR$(n)
NEXT n
PRINT
PRINT "========================================================"
FOR n = 224 TO 240
READ b$(n)
NEXT n
DATA "alpha","beta","gamma","pi", "sigma", "sigma"
DATA "mu", "tau", "phi","theta", "omega", "delta"
DATA "psi","phi", "epsilon", "pi","xi"
FOR n = 224 TO 240
PRINT a$(n); "="; b$(n),
NEXT n
PRINT "========================================================"
FOR n = 3 TO 6
c$(n) = CHR$(n): PRINT c$(n); " ";
NEXT n
END

[steve]

DonH, as you've illustrated, QBasic can print the Greek ascii
characters, but, it's not designed to function in a bilingual mode.
I'm not at all sure what your intention is. Is it simply to output
Greek text, or to actually write programs in Greek ?
If the latter, that is beyond the capabilities of QBasic.

[DonH]

"steve" <blunt.a...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:d2ea36cd-2819-4c6a...@v7g2000pbs.googlegroups.com...

# Mine is only a casual interest, and all I wanted was to transliterate
Greek letters into English equivalent, not translate.
It seems the QBasic listing of Greek letters is only for mathematical
purposes, but the full alphabet (alpha to omega) is listed in my Penguin
Dictionary of Mathematics, even if not all letters are used by
mathematicians.
In QBasic's case, it may be an opportunity missed.

[steve]

On Apr 5, 12:35 pm, "DonH" <donlhumphr...@bigpond.com> wrote:
>    In QBasic's case, it may be an opportunity missed.

Well, you have to consider the time frame in which QBasic was
developed (mid '80s) and the limitations of both the hardware and
software of the time. Windows pretty much solved that. If I recall
correctly, the ascii character set was contained on the rom bios. It
may still be.
I remember reading in one of my reference books, that there was a way,
that if you had created your own character set, you could
programatically replace the character set with your own, loaded in
ram. Then, you would re-vector the location where dos went to lookup
the characters. It's a possibility.

[Helmut_Meukel]

DonH wrote:
> "steve" <blunt.a...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:d2ea36cd-2819-4c6a...@v7g2000pbs.googlegroups.com...
>> DonH, as you've illustrated, QBasic can print the Greek ascii
>> characters, but, it's not designed to function in a bilingual mode.
>> I'm not at all sure what your intention is. Is it simply to output
>> Greek text, or to actually write programs in Greek ?
>> If the latter, that is beyond the capabilities of QBasic.
>
> # Mine is only a casual interest, and all I wanted was to transliterate Greek
> letters into English equivalent, not translate.

Hmmm,
you do realize English is written using Latin letters, do you?
And there is no 1:1 correspondence between the "Greek" and the "Latin"
characters. Some are equivalent, but not all.
If three scholars are tasked to write an english text using "Greek"
letters, I bet you get at least 5 different verions. ;-)

Helmut.

[DonH]

"Helmut_Meukel" <Helmut...@bn-hof.invalid> wrote in message
news:jlq8ua$vlt$1...@dont-email.me...

# There is sufficient correspondence with most of the Latin alphabet for my
purposes -
ABC(K)DEFGILMNOPRSTV(U)XZ - and can guess the rest from context, if left
blank.