Sunday, January 30, 2011

[ownqoegk] Hangul for programming

Consider a programming language where the identifiers and reserved words are all in Hangul (Korean).  Although each character would be bigger on the screen, more can packed into each single character (syllable block).  There some 11,000 single characters, instead of just 26, for, say, short variable names.  Perhaps all reserved words can be a single character.  Unlike Chinese, one only needs to memorize the 51 letters which are used to construct syllable blocks.

One could consider inventing a syllabic orthography for English, but our love of consonant clusters and homophones might make things tricky.

Some of the Korean jamo are very similar looking, which is all right for a natural language which always has context, but perhaps not so good for a computer language.  For example, just a few pixels corresponding to a short stroke (e.g., ae vs. yae) could make a very big difference on whether the plane falls out of the sky.  An intelligent compiler could warn.

No comments :