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How do programmers in countries whose writing system is, say, right-to-left write their code? Say if they were using C# compiler, do they follow the left-to-right approach or do they have a different IDE that allows them write C# code right-to-left?

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It would make understanding const-ness in pointers easier. –  CashCow Feb 24 '11 at 15:45

4 Answers 4

If they're using a language that came out of the western world (pretty much all of them) they write left to right. Generally they'll use native language variables, comments and output, but the code itself is in English. It's also relatively common to hear people talking about programming in a non-English language peppering their conversations with English when they're mentioning programming terms even if there is a native equivalent.

There are also a reasonably sized group of non-native English speakers who just use English in their code simply because it is the dominant language in comp sci (Linus Torvalds being an excellent example)

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From my experience in Israel, everything is done in English in terms of code. In spoke language people will often use Hebrew (or Russian) but use english technical terms.

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I'm dev from the Arab world. We use the same IDEs as everyone else. Though some of them have localized labels (Visual Studio 2010 from instance has an Arabic add-on), the code itself is still Left-To-Right. Unless you're a bad coder, then the variable names and such are also in Latin letters, though they are some times Romanized Arabic as opposed to English.

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As a developer from an arab country (Morocco) we use the same IDEs as everyone uses, such as eclipse, VS2010, netbeans...etc

but there is some programming languages that ain't english based syntax click here

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