Decimal Point vs. Decimal Comma

Am Wed, 06 Apr 2016 01:18:42 +0300 schrieb Dimiter_Popoff:

This is a pompous "my world the only one I can imagine" point of view, and there are of course other pompous people in other parts of the world which have very similar views (replace English with their preferred lingua franca). A number of cheap Chinese chips, which are relevant to embedded control now, are designed in China, have only Chinese datasheets, and the people who sell them see no need to translate them into English; they can't easily reach customers outside China, and they make good money. Why should a programmer who wants to program these chips (and therefore is fluent in Chinese, because otherwise, he can't program them, or even get them) need to learn English, which is pretty hard for them, just as it is hard for us to learn Chinese?

So they are pompous, and say, "we program in Chinese, that's a big enough subset of the world".

Well this is a valid way of seeing things of course but in my view learning English is the way forward for humanity, until it becomes (evolves into) Galactic Standard or whatever we call it then (I suppose the name Asimov gave it will make its way to real world use).

The vast majority of the knowledge humans have is in English; the simplest way to make this universally available is not by translating it to everyone's language but by people learning English. It has become what it is for a good reason.

In the short run people who do not speak it may have the need to program something using some hieroglyph based language or whatever but asking the rest of the world to adapt to that and provide them with tools rather than with some English schoolbook is impractical and counterproductive.

Mind you, I have seen stuff you probably have not. Back in the 80-s in the Soviet block I got a databook of a Russian clone of the 8080. Everything was in Cyrillic, mnemonics, everything - translated so no trace of the English original had remained. I bought the book at a bookshop just for the huge laugh it inspired, not just in me. A huge effort put in by people who have been competent and could have done something really useful instead.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff, TGI

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Excel does some things right. I believe they have supported an engineering notation display format for some time now while in LibreOffice it is an add on that is hard to implement. I finally got it working in a spread sheet and copy that to any new spread sheet I want to use Eng Notation in. Eng Notation really should be a documented part of the LO display formats. Watch, this will have been fixed since I did this work a few years ago.

There are certainly a few things that Excel (and Word) do better than LibreOffice - LO is far from perfect. Excel is better at handling very large spreadsheets, for example. But there are more points where LO wins, as far as I am concerned. There are small points, such as when drawing graphs in Excel, if there are data points that are N/A (like division by 0), Excel puts these points as 0 - LO skips the points entirely. There are visual and ease-of-use points - MS Office has that hideous ribbon and so much clutter that you need a huge screen if you want to actually see any of the text you are writing. Then there are killer features - LO has excellent support for generating pdf files efficiently and with tables of contexts, clickable links, etc. And with LO, you can work with big documents without fearing that your file sizes will grow absurdly until one day your office program will decide it's time the document got corrupted beyond recognition. Excel can't work sensibly with text imports that don't match exactly the format set on your Windows - LO can cope with anything. And of course, MS Office is restricted to Windows (with some incompatible versions for Macs) - LO runs on Linux as well.

We use both suites at my work, with the majority using LO. But IT support and help for office programs is dominated by fixing issues people have with MS Office - LO simply works as it is supposed to do.

Sorry, I am a native English speaker but I feel the need to challenge this "fact". In Physics, the vast majority of knowledge was in German, at least until relatively recently. The fact that the primary language of science can change in a single generation should give pause to the claim that English should be the primary language. And therefore must be the only language.

Pretty short sighted view, I say.

A common language would be great. Do you happen to know JCL? (Definitely NOT English!) In the science and technology fields we are part way there when we use mathematics. But until we have one common language, well I actually am sad that I am not multilingual.

I would differ. It made sense to them to clone that chip. So is what AMD did also wasted so that they "could have done something really useful instead"?

ed

I am not so sure you have a fact here but even if you did it is "was" vs. "is".

English *is* the primary language, like it or not. Then it is not just the scientific world which uses it universally; e.g. in literature it is also unmatched in terms of quality*quantity. And in electronics and computer design/programming it just is the only language.

I don't think either of us will live to see this proven.

I am not that multilingual either - I speak Bulgarian (native), English, German and Russian only, the Latin part is a pretty big hole in my education. But I can't say I have much if any use of either of the non-English languages I know in my programming.

Well it was laughable all the way. I was NOT referring to the fact they cloned something (not the brightest of ideas but is done all the time by many people). I was referring to the part that they did completely translate/reinvent the signal names, opcode mnemonics etc. using horrible Cyrillic abbreviations and stuff, completely useless apart from giving me a good laugh. Whether you like the fact or not it was a perfect example of my point that it is much easier to learn a language than to translate a document written in it above a certain size of that document - and this threshold size is not that great at all.

Dimiter

------------------------------------------------------ Dimiter Popoff, TGI

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HAL/s?

That's kind of a _chauvanistic_ _weltanschauung_! ;)

Hah, well, it may sound as such but it can hardly be that :).

My first language is not English, in fact I have never set foot in an English speaking country. I am of Bulgarian and German descent (my gran was German), so "chauvinistic" can't really be attributed to me in this context (nor in any context, I am just not the type). I am just being practical.

Dimiter

And you have a fact?? Can you provide a reference to your claim?

the fact I was referring to was that the dominant language can and does change. When I got my BS degree, the most Physics papers, especially the important ones were still in German. English was growing fast and became dominant as it is now. So I witnessed the change.

As I said, the dominant language CAN and does change. it can do so rather quickly.

here's a question for you: Do you advocate a single programming language for all applications? For all Operating systems? For all processors?

just because a language is dominant does NOT prove it is better.

I compliment you. You are still leagues ahead of me.

And my point is: it was easier FOR THEM. I'm glad you enjoyed the result, but we may have to leave it at the agree to disagree level.

Ed

I am not sure I have a fact against what you think is a fact. Did Newton produce his works in German? Did Rutherford? I have never read their papers so I don't know the answer to that.

What you refer to as a dominant language in the has in fact had a very limited coverage. Todays communications have changed the environment completely. We don't know what the future holds of course, we can only extrapolate based on what we know - and the result of that is clear.

This is of course not only true but also a very good point you have against mine. Diversity is always good I suppose.

However programming languages have had no time to evolve into something stable (just the fact that C is the dominant language is proof enough that it is still baby days for these languages).

OTOH English has had what - a millennium? - to evolve and prove it does a good job. Yet the diversity argument still holds, I don't have much to argue against it. Giving it up may indeed be shortsighted, then may be not, I just don't know.

Oh if this is your point you are plain wrong on that, it was neither easier for them, it got nowhere at all. Programmers in Bulgaria all used English to some extent, in fact it does depend how good one is as a programmer on ones English. Not just because of the language, the ability to learn languages is crucial when it comes to programming.

Dimiter

.......

Newton's work and many around that time was in Latin 'Principia Mathematica' if I remember correctly.

Up until the mid 19th century most science papers were in Greek then Latin for the bulk of time as the common language.

Some languages are mandated International Air Traffic control is mainly English and has been for quite some time.

Some places like UN and EU have several mandated languages

I don't know that Greek was ever used significantly for science papers (except by the Greeks, of course). Latin was dominant in Europe until mid 19th century, and in the middle ages Arabic was common (because the Islamic scholars were studying the world while the Catholic Church was burning people for trying to figure out how things work). As scientists were very spread out, and book publishing was difficult and expensive, it was important to have a common language and avoid the need for translation - thus Latin was vital.

Since that time, scientists worked more in their native languages. Partly this was because it was easier to make and publish translations, so that a common language was not as essential. The other major reason is that science was no longer being done by rich nobles with a church education in Latin, but more by "ordinary" people - in particular, industrialists and engineers looking to solve practical problems were more involved. Scientific papers were published in native languages, along with a few "international" languages - English, German, French and Russian were, I believe, the most common choices. It is only since global travel and communication, and global publication of books and journals, that it has become useful to concentrate on a single language again - people don't want to wait for translations. And perhaps if machine translation ever gets good enough, we'll go back to native languages.

There was a famous one deliberately written in Greek, early 20th Century about the various sexual habits of penguins in Antartica...

Some of the earliest sceince 'papers' were by the Greeks (Pythagorus..) Yes various other ones were in regional languages like Arabic and I believe Urdu (Indian sub-continent scholars) etc.

Politicics, culture and regions dictated what written in