Misc #12722: Localizing Ruby

• Status: Third Party's Issue
• Assignee: -

[vasilakisfil (Filippos Vasilakis)]

I would like to teach Ruby in kids. However, the kids I am aiming for don't speak English and their age is below 10. Is there a way I can localize Ruby reserved words and errors? in theory it shouldn't be that difficult, in practice I don't know how much work it is.

Thank you.

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

To change "reserved words", you have to modify (or add) defs/keywords file and rebuild.
And if your words contain non-US-ASCII characters, you have to remove mb == ENC_CODERANGE_7BIT condition from parse_ident() in parse.y too.

[jwmittag (Jörg W Mittag)]

Is that really necessary? Sure, the keywords are derived from English, but they aren't English, they are Ruby. class is an English word, but it has a very specific meaning in Ruby. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it actually helps learning Ruby if you simply treat the keywords as nonsense gibberish and don't have any preconceived notions about what they should mean.

And besides, it's not just the 40 or so keywords, it's also the dozens, hundreds, thousands of predefined constants, globals, and methods just in the core library, let alone the entire standard libraries (where you will also have to change all directory and file names and the corresponding require calls, I mean απαιτώ calls).

[vasilakisfil (Filippos Vasilakis)]

Thanks! I played a bit with the keywords but I figured out that indeed it's kind of difficult to localize the entire thing (i.e. kernel methods etc) given that the compiler was not built with internationalization in mind (which makes sense..). Thank you!

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Status changed from Open to Third Party's Issue

Would you mind if I close this ticket?