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Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by globuous on Friday October 25, 2019 @05:04AM (#21353137)
There’s open office calc (and ms excel i guess) !! Its a huge pain for me actually. Once my grandpa needed help with an OOo calc sheet because his bank csv exports were super dumb and listed price columns as strings with the unit symbol as opposed to just the number. So i split the string and casted to number on my ooo calc (in english), but the casting didnt work on his french ooo calc. I spend the next 40 minutes trying to find the god damn function in french. It was surprisingly hard !! But eventually we figured it out (was and i forgot the casting function both in french and english as i never use calc/excel).

So ooo calc vba equivalent is translated in various languages ;p

Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by Al-Khwarizmi on Friday October 25, 2019 @05:24AM (#21353227)
Yep, same in Excel. And as a Spanish Excel user, I can attest it's a pain. If you find a solution for a nontrivial Excel problem online, chances are it will be in English. Then, you need to manually translate function names to Spanish to make it work in Spanish Excel. Translations are often non-obvious (average is PROMEDIO, not MEDIA? really?).

While I understand localization can be useful for a subset of users, at least they could have made the English function names also work, or have a suggestion mechanism to suggest the Spanish translation if you type an English function name. I don't understand why they don't do this.

Anyway, the problems of name localization are nothing compared to the problems of using commas as decimal separator. People from English-speaking countries will never know how many extra hours of life they have from not fiddling with decimal separators, text encoding programming issues, etc.

Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by phkahler on Friday October 25, 2019 @07:19AM (#21353841)
I would hope Excel could convert all the built in functions by changing a language setting somewhere. The problem you describe should have been the first thing to come up when they decided to localize it.
Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by usrusr on Friday October 25, 2019 @05:52AM (#21353356)
One of the early sins of office file formats, translating formula symbols not just in presentation but right down in the persistent form.

If memory serves me right, back when MS Office macro viruses were the threat du jour, there was already a bit of a remedy in place for those formats that would translate the formulas and macros of incoming files from a different language version of the same software. This caused secondary waves of "mutated" viruses that had crossed multiple language barriers and came back slightly different but still working, foiling the efforts of checksum based virus scanners.

Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by Moru on Friday October 25, 2019 @05:24AM (#21353225)
Yes, that has been a constant confusion for me since they started translating office. Why would you translate commands to another language?
Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by jobigoud on Friday October 25, 2019 @05:30AM (#21353253)
I think it's supposed to be more like a DSL, aimed at non-programmers. So it may make sense to translate something like "Average", if you don't expect your target users to know english.

Not as stupid as translating low level error messages.

Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by magicalhippo on Friday October 25, 2019 @06:12AM (#21353462)
But it should be a presentation thing. The formulas stored in the file should be the same regardless of language. There's no good reason not to.