文言, a classical Chinese programming language

文言文編程語言. Lingdong Huang.

The world’s most popular programming languages all have one thing in common: their keywords are in English (if, else, return, print, etc.). In fact, English is so integral to programming that it’s hard to imagine a programming language in any other language, let alone classical Chinese (古文). To remedy this situation, Lingdong Huang, a computer science student at Carnegie Mellon University, decided to add diversity to programming languages. Inspired by classical Chinese literature, Lingdong developed Wenyan-Lang, a programming language based on Chinese Hanzi characters. For example, in Wenyan-Lang, var c = false; translates to 吾有一爻。曰陰。名之曰「丙」。. Huang also developed a renderer that can display the program in the same format as ancient Chinese texts, and parse the resulting SVG file back to the original program. Check out the on-line IDE, which shows numerous examples of programs in action, like a universal Turing machine, a Mandelbrot set plotter, a Tower of Hanoi solver, etc.

⇨ “文言 / wenyan‑lang.”

⇨ GitHub, “文言文編程語言 A programming language for the ancient Chinese.”

⇨ Synced, Yuan Yuan, “CMU Senior Develops World’s First Classical Chinese Programming Language.”