Renaming identifiers & debugging

[Luca]

News123 wrote:
> a pragmatic approach might be to preprocess the source code
> and keep the original version as comments above the translated line.
> (for debugging)

Not very nice to see though. This change should be transparent to the 
kid, he/she should not be aware of this "translation".

> or to preprecess the input line before the 'exec'.

This could be a solution, yes, but then i would also need to figure out 
a way to show the original line when debugging (still, i know nothing 
about pdb, maybe it is possible in a easy way).

> It might be, that kids are flexible enough to use English words without
> understanding them.
> 
> My younger brother could write Pascal before he learnt any English and
> he never cared, what 'if' 'then' 'else' 'for', etc. meant.

I had a similar experience. When i was a middle schooler i knew nothing 
about English and so i learned Basic and then Pascal without actually 
knowing that those words had a meaning at all. For me they were just 
kind of "magical words" that i could use to tell the computer what to 
do. So i know for sure that this is possible. But... imagine the use of 
this language in a elementary school. Some kids, like me or you or your 
brother would be interested enough to find it easy to learn the new 
words. For others it would only be a pain. Another lesson among others 
that to them makes no sense at all. If we could make it easier for them 
to understand the words used in the language the teacher would have an 
easier time to explain some concepts and maybe even these kids could 
have fun and begin to love it.

I understand that this "breaks" the language, that it would be better if 
they would just learn the "original" language... but most teachers would 
ask "then why not use Logo instead? it is already in our language..."

I have nothing against logo of course, i have learned it myself even 
before Pascal and i had lots of fun with it. But python is much more 
widespread than logo and i think in some ways it makes "more sense" than 
logo and it is not much harder. The only problem that i see is that Logo 
does have its commands translated while python doesn't nor, it seems, 
there is an easy way to add this functionality.

> It might be useful though to internationalize the python errror messages
> if that's not something already done.

Yes, this would be very important... but still, it should be easy for 
the teacher to translate the messages to make them more understandable 
to the kids.

For instance...

* Python:
 >>> draw
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'draw' is not defined

* Logo:
? draw
I don't know how  to draw

Logo's message, while maybe too simple for a professional developer, is 
certainly much more easy for a kid. So you see, it is not just a matter 
of internationalization... it is also a matter of users-target. If i am 
talking to a young kid i should use words and concepts that are easy for 
him/her to understand... so, for my target, it would be very important 
not only a correct translation in my language, but also the use of words 
and concepts that are familiar to a kid.

Thanx,
   Luca