Languages outside the Anglosphere, featuring BASICOIS

Software
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Let’s see what we can find out about efforts to provide programming languages using keywords drawn from anywhere other than English. (APL need not apply!)

BASICOIS is a French dialect of Basic, probably from Quebec. Here’s a program, from L’Ordinateur Individuel Magazine (page 78 of issue 0010):

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We see these keywords:

  • FAIS, ECRIS, DEMANDE, VATEN, INFOS, EMPLIS
  • REPETE…JUSQUE…PAR…ENCORE
  • SI…ALORS
  • VAVIENS… REVIENS
  • FIN

as well as DIM REM and RAZ (clear screen?) and various functions, such as DROITE$ and so on. Is HSD RND?

Somewhere else, I see hints of a LOGO en Français.

And it seems there was an LSE (Language Symbolique d’Enseignement) but I think that may be from the Francosphere, not a dialect. In fact Wikipedia (well, of course) more or less describes it as a structured Basic, although L’Ordinateur Individuel says it is très différent.

There’s more here:

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I am pretty certain I saw similarly translated Basic for Finnish in the 1980s…

There’s Fjölnir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fjölnir_(programming_language) if you want to program like a Viking.

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And of course the Fjölnir wikipedia link leads us to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Non-English-based_programming_languages

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(I see now there’s a handy cut-out-and-keep reference card for BASICOIS showing all the translations.)

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Logo is probably the programming language with the most versions in non English natural languages. For example, SuperLogo is a Portuguese port of Berkeley Logo for Windows.

In the early 1980s I saw a computer which used Portuguese keywords in its built-in Basic, but I have never seen anything about it on the web. At the time it made sense as I saw some students having a really hard time programming in normal Basic because they couldn’t memorize “n e x t”.

Scratch and its descendants are available in many different human languages.

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I am pretty certain I saw similarly translated Basic for Finnish in the 1980s…

A typo, I guess… It’s Iceland, not Finland. And yes, Iceland tries to avoid importing new words from other languages if an Icelandic one can work or be created. There are lovely Icelandic words for where e.g. Norwegian takes the easy way out and just includes an English word.

skrifastreng(;"Hello, world!"), That’s wonderful… “write string”, though “streng” is a word (also used in Norwegian) which I still can’t figure out why it’s supposed to work as “string” (a list of characters).

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No, I know the difference because I live in Finland :grinning:

Two different things.

(1) I saw similarly (to the BASICOIS) translated Basic in Finnish
(2) Fjölnir

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Ah, I didn’t get that the link wasn’t about your first item. Sorry about that. I tried to search for info about Basic in a Finnish version, but of course it’s impossible to search for… all you get is the word “basic” translated to Finnish! :slight_smile:

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The thing I vaguely remember was something along the lines of someone customizing the C64 BASIC to use Finnish keywords instead of English, in some 1980s Finnish microcomputer magazine.