OT: Programmers whos first language is not English

[Stephen Horne]

I'm thinking of creating my own programming language (again - but
taking it more seriously, though the odds of it ever competing with
Python are pretty close to zero).

One thing I'm considering is the use of a non-ASCII source code.

In particular, I'm thinking of using XML - not as an AST
representation, but merely as a way of marking up source code. This
would require special editors, of course, but if WYSIWYG editors can
be created for HTML I don't see why programmers are still stuck in the
plaintext age.

One possible use of XML might be that 'keywords' and 'symbols' could
be stored as XML elements specifying non-language-specific tokens -
the editor could have a local language table to recognise keywords as
the programmer types (or could use hotkeys to insert whole keywords
Speccy-style) and could present them on screen with colour
highlighting. This would require little (if any) more work than
existing syntax-highlighting editors.

I'm quite curious what other people think about this kind of idea -
particularly people whose first language is not English.

-- 
steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk