I ended up on the (Chinese-language) page for 丙正正¹, a Chinese C++ variant. There was a code example, which I ran through Google Translate to see what would happen. The result is surprisingly readable (and obviously a C-family language)²:
Empty chess file :: set comments (character * s, integer n)
{
If (n> = maximum number of comments)
For (; maximum number of annotations <= n; maximum number of comments + +)
Comment [Maximum number of annotations] = NONE;
If (s == NULL or the string length (s) == 0)
Returns;
If (annotation [n]! = NONE)
Delete Comment [n];
Comment [n] = new character [string length (s) +1];
String Copy (annotation [n], s);
}
체스::리플달기 (캐릭터 * ㅅ, 숫자 ㄴ)
{
면 (ㄴ >= 최고리플번수)
용 (; 최고리플번수 <= ㄴ;)
면 (ㅅ == 무 아니면 문자 길이 (ㅅ) == 0)
도라오기;
면 (리플 [ㄴ]! = 없음)
리플 지우기 [ㄴ];
문자 복사 (리플 [ㄴ], ㅅ);
}
}
What's interesting about Korean alphabet is that you could read and write the code above within a few days of memorizing the Korean alphabet system. Even a non-native Korean speaker can read the above example (you could read about 70% of it as most words are phonetic spellings of english words like Chess = 체스. and write it without speaking a word of Korean if you knew the consonants and alphabets. There's very little Korean word in that example above.
Good luck with writing it in Chinese (memorize all 4000 characters) or Japanese (Kanji, Katakana, Hirakana a clusterfck). If you're gonna build an Asian programming language, Korean alphabet's flexibility makes it easier if not more efficient to express developer intention.
Majority of the english words have been phonetically typed in Korean, there's very little semantic Korean meaning.
I have a translation of "Design of the Unix Operating System" in Chinese, and take great comfort in the fact that I can still get the gist of all the source code listings--even despite the comments in Chinese.
I admire the simplicity of the grammar in Chinese (from the year I took of it in college), but honestly I find logographic languages are kind of gross.
EDIT:
Fine, fine, I admit it: a language with millenia of cruft is totally reasonable to use as the way of persisting the cruftiest programming language in the world.
Indeed, the same years of hard study that are required to write and read Chinese literately should be added onto the same years of study required to write and read C++ reliably.
This is such a comically bad and obtuse idea I think we should propose it as the next draft standard.
EDIT2:
Look, explain your downvotes (in the language of your choice!). My opinion is simply that alphabetic languages (here exemplified by English) are superior to logographic languages--mostly because they require knowing fewer characters.
I may be grossly misunderstanding Chinese here; as claimed, my schooling in it is limited.
Chinese characters (and similar writing systems) do have certain advantages versus alphabetic systems though. The smallest unit of writing has more information embedded in it. You've got a decent chance of guessing the meaning of a compound word if you know some of the characters in it, though not necessarily the pronunciation. With alphabets, it's reversed, if you know all of the pieces of a word, pronunciation is usually simple, but meaning not necessarily so (especially in English). As a result, the written language is more dense, and can actually be read more quickly.
Finally, with an appropriate method, it doesn't have to take years to learn enough characters to write and read literately, I can read Japanese at a high school level, and I've been at it for a year and a half.
So, Japanese is a uniquely bad example here, right?
As I understand it, there are three alphabets: kanji (lots of Chinese characters), katakana, and hiragana. The latter two are used to spell out the syllables of words, in some sense acting like an alphabetic language. Kanji seems to have a thousand or two characters in use, whereas katakana and hiragana have around fifty.
Beyond looking up stroke numbers and radicals, I found dictionary usage for Chinese characters somewhat hard--English lets you basically do a very easy binary search on a word (start at most significant character, find section, move to next most significant character, etc.).
Bad in what way exactly? Hiragana and Katakana are easier to pick up, because there is more burden placed in learning each individual word. With the baseline investment to learn the Kanji in place, each new word is just a composition of characters and their associated ideas that you already know.
You can do the same thing with dictionaries in Japanese or Chinese, though it works best if you use a dictionary that lets you handwrite in the characters (it helps a lot if you learn your radicals and stroke orders well, so that you can easily write characters you don't know).
Oh, so, my point was that using Japanese was a bad example, precisely because two of the three alphabets are used nonlogographically. It is also my understanding that new words and loanwords are spelled out phonetically in those alphabets, instead of grafting some new character into the kanji.
"if you use a dictionary that lets you handwrite in the character"
I'm unfamiliar with any paper dictionary with that capability.
"Chinese characters (and similar writing systems) do have certain advantages versus alphabetic systems though."
You end up with much lower population literacy rate than countries with alphabetic systems. ex) China at 92% vs Korea at 99%.
Hangul was created 600 years ago to counter the difficulties faced by ordinary citizens attempting to memorize the Chinese alphabets. Hangul also by far one of the more exotic alphabet system. This video sums it up nicely:
² empty where one might expect void, character, for, string, &c.