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Comment by canucker2016 | Hacker News Reader

canucker2016

I think the worst example of this overzealous localization was when some person translated the VB(A) reserved keywords to the appropriate language (I want to say it was german or swedish). Happened in the 1990s.

Your programming language reserved keywords changing depending on your selected language was a big facepalm.

Searching for this problem on the web doesn't produce any valid relevant results, so the web has forgotten or maybe the horror has been plastered over.

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VBA is still localized in many languages, I saw macros in italian. It's not just VBA keywords either, even excel functions are localized. e.g. this is from microsoft's docs[0]

    =CERCA.VERT(B2;C2:E7;3;VERO)

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/it-it/office/cercare-valori-co...

E.g. Excel does that still.

So obnoxious, although apparently in newer versions you can modify what language you want.

I remember seeing the dictionary to translate between German and English function names[1], one time I googled for "Excel German translation" and Google proudly showed the Translate interace pre-filled with "English: excel / German: übertreffen"

[1] https://www.perfectxl.com/excel-glossary/what-is-excel-funct...

The feature itself isn't that crazy – it's even a good thing, especially considering that Excel (and to lesser degree, VBA) were designed for ordinary people and that in the 80s/90s English was less common than it is today.

Where it went wrong is that as soon as you choose a language you were stuck with that. It should have been a display option.

Yes. The best is when you get an Excel file from Japan and the formulas are in Japanese. Who needs encryption or obfuscation.

No? Formulas are stored in a language-independent way, you should see English formulas in that file.

The missing part of that story is probably the file is a .xlsm (or even an older .xls with macros) and therefore has VBA scripts, which is not saved in a language-independent way.

Probably someone manipulating with formulas with VBA and improperly using FormulaLocal property. Formulas are stored in language neutral way and it shouldn't be a problem under normal circumstances.

But is it Shit-JIS, or are you lucky enough to get UTF-8?

Maybe you can safely believe it was all just a nightmare... certainly sounds like one!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21352796

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