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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Nice, I was unaware of this. Take OCaml for example, it was primarily developed by the French if I recall

    OCaml was written in 1996 by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon, Damien Doligez, and Didier Rémy at INRIA in France

Yeah, but they didn't write keywords in French, they went straight to `let`, `rec`, `if`, `then`, `else`... Because they're just keywords, they could just be punctuations; so as long as you don't go full brainfck.

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The comments were quite often in French, however! Until relatively recently, the OCaml compiler would also sometimes emit error messages in French in some obscure cases.

How long ago was this "relatively recently"? When I translated all the remaining French comments in the OCaml compiler nearly 10 years ago, there were already no warnings nor error messages in French.

Most recent I remember was in 2011: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/issues/5419

Note that this is an error message from the ocamldoc tool, and not an error message from the OCaml compiler itself. Funnily enough, looking that the repository history, this French error message was introduced in the very first version of ocamldoc in 2002 and went undetected (or unreported) for 9 years. Thanks for the historical tidbit!

I'm sure there is, somewhere in the deep recesses of the Internet, a camlp4 or camlp5 syntax extension to replace `let`, `rec`, `if`, `then`, `else` with `soit`, `réc`, `si`, `alors`, `sinon` :)

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