
Geographically isolated bugs - babuskov
http://www.rapapaing.com/blog/?p=52
======
Kenji
"What can you do to avoid this problem? Use UTF-8. Always."

I disagree. I think that the solution to the problem is using English
comments. This has many reasons, it blends better into the programming code
that usually has English keywords, variable names are usually in English and
ASCII only (no, JavaScript, you're special, as always) and the most important
reason, it allows the most people on this planet to understand it (okay,
there's also Chinese but it's pretty much limited to a country). I worked on a
Korean piece of code. All the variable names were in English but the comments
were in Korean. Why, just why? Talk about unnecessary complexity, at the end
of the day you need to understand two languages in addition to the programming
language. That just means I literally don't understand any comments. (And I'm
not saying that because I'm lazy and don't want to learn languages; English
isn't my native language)

~~~
pavel_lishin
> the most important reason, it allows the most people on this planet to
> understand it

But I'm usually not writing code for most people on the planet. I'm usually
writing it for work, or myself.

> I worked on a Korean piece of code. All the variable names were in English
> but the comments were in Korean. Why, just why?

Because the writers were probably not fluent in English! The purpose of a
comment is to explain something; if you cannot explain it fluently, then the
comment is useless.

I speak a tiny bit of Spanish, but if history had turned out differently only
in that Spanish was the language 99% of programming was based on, I would
_still not leave comments in Spanish_ , because they would be nearly
incomprehensible to everyone, including myself.

> at the end of the day you need to understand two languages in addition to
> the programming language.

At the end of the day, _someone_ needs to learn two languages; you're saying
that it should never be _you_ , but someone writing some code you happened to
run across.

~~~
kijin
> _The purpose of a comment is to explain something; if you cannot explain it
> fluently, then the comment is useless._

Exactly. If a piece of code needs a comment in the first place, it means that
there's something subtle about the task that cannot be fullly conveyed using
code alone. But that's exactly the kind of thing that people have trouble
expressing clearly in a non-native language.

I would much prefer a clearly written comment in another language that I can
ask a colleague to translate for me, than a misleading comment in English.

------
woodman
[http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-
down-b...](http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-by-the-
international-date-line-03087/)

More of a locale bug :)

------
tantalor
Seems like a bug for the compiler to treat a single-line comment as multiline;
definitely not expected behavior.

~~~
pdw
It's not a compiler bug, it's unfortunately what the C standard requires. That
being said, every compiler I know of will issue a warning for this construct.

