Re:Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
by all2 on Saturday March 14, 2026 @09:42PM
(#47383383)
So... iirc Korean words are constructed out of symbols, would it be possible to mutate the meaning of keywords by giving the symbols meaning and constructing new blocks of symbols?
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Re:Show HN: Han – A Korean programming language written in Rust
by xodn348 on Saturday March 14, 2026 @09:56PM
(#47383479)
That's a fascinating idea! Hangul is indeed compositional — 한 = ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ — so in theory you could assign meaning to individual jamo components.
But in practice, breaking syllables into jamo would make keywords less readable, which goes against Hangul's design goal. And considering how AI-assisted coding works today, fully named descriptive keywords actually reduce errors — LLMs perform better with explicit, unambiguous tokens than with cryptic symbol compositions.
So Han leans toward more descriptive Korean keywords rather than shorter symbolic ones. Readability over brevity.
Interesting direction to think about though — thanks for the question.