Damrn it! You mean now I learnt perl I gotta learn french as well? :)

Completely OT...

A few years ago I had to write the set-top box code for an interactive TV programme. In French. An example:

debut lecture reaction nulle
@10:00:46:03
fin lecture;
si BOUTON=2 alors CANAL=3
[download]

There was no paper documentation for the box available to me. I was in the UK and the people who knew the system were few timezones away in (French speaking parts of) Canada. We could only syntax check the code locally, not having the hardware to run it on site.

Of course being a product of the English educational system I can't speak French. In fact I managed to fail Graded Test French (the lowest format of exam available at the time) getting less on the multiple-choice questions than I would have if I had guessed at random.

Gosh that was a fun project (actually - it went surprisingly well :-)

Hey, don't laugh, a whole bunch of French Comp-Sci students learnt first a language named LSE (link in French, of course!) and its ancestor LSD (! For Langage Sans Difficulté - Painless Language) which was a cross between Pascal and Basic, using French keywords!

...and what were you doing at school today Pierre?

It was great! We spent the whole afternoon doing LSD! :)

You'll have to imagine the cartoon French accents. I tried typing them, but my French is so lousy I was likely to offend someone

I can't see why English should have the monopoly, and I'm quite surprised the Ministry of Culture haven't intervened to prevent computerise going the same way a l'weekend and l'sandwich :)

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -Richard Buckminster Fuller

My first "High Level Language" was indeed LSE. I thought you made up the LSD part before following you link. In a parisian meeting of Les mongueurs de Perl we discovered we were many having learnt LSE.

-- stefp
Come to YAPC::Europe 2003 in Paris, 23-25 July 2003.