An Arabic programming environment

This work presents the interface design of an Arabic Programming Environment (APE). The environment is an attempt to Arabize the user interface for programming languages under MS-Windows. It consists of two interrelated parts. The first part is the Arabic environment that enables users to create and edit programs in Arabic. The second part is the Arabic compiler. This paper describes only the first part of this project. It also states the main characteristics of the Arabic language that affects this work. 1. I N T R O D U C T I O N Almost throughout the world, computers play an important role in people's life. The concept of ignorance starts to shift from not knowing how to read and write to not knowing how to operate and utilize computers. For instance, in Saudi Arabia many houses have computers either for scientific purposes or just for entertainment. Moreover, computer classes have been introduced in all high schools. Education planners in Saudi Arabia are nowadays thinking seriously to introduce computer classes not only in middle schools, but also in elementary schools [11]. The main difficulty facing such planing is the English language that is taught starting at the middle schools. The best idea to enhance computer teaching in Arab countries is to Arabize computers in all levels: "Permission to make digital/hard copy of all or part of this material without fee is granted provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the ACM copyright/server notice, the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.(ACM). To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee." © 1996 ACM 0-89791-820-7 96 0002 3.50 hardware interfaces such as operating systems, software interfaces such as applications, and programming languages. Computer Arabization can be defined as the conversion of well tested and well proven computer software so as to enable Arabic-speaking users to utilize it effectively and efficiently. This work is to develop an Arabic Programming Environment (APE) to support programming in Arabic. This paper is comprised of five sections, including this introduction. The rest of this section states the main objectives and motivations. It also defines the design guidelines for developing the APE. Section 2 is devoted to the main impacts of the Arabic language characteristics on the APE. Section 3 discusses related work. Section 4 describes the APE. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper. 1.1 Objectives and Motivations The main objective towards the Arabization of computing is to be able to write programs in Arabic. Arabic programming languages and their environments should be available as other international programming languages to enhance the advancements in the Arab world. The APE is an integrated set of tools for program development such as editor, compiler, linker, and debugger. So, it is substantially different from the Arabic word processors available in the market. Arabic language, in general, has many unique features that make it different from all European languages. Consequently, developing an Arabic environment is different from developing an environment for other languages.