alt Hacker NewsThis is indeed a cool project! Happy to see experiments on non-English programming languages. I have one question — not trying to be offensive or doubting, just out of curiosity — does Han make use of the unique properties of Hangul (or Korean in general)? Like, I remember sawing a Turkish programming language on HN the other day, and I might be wrong but my impression was it makes use of some syntax unique to Turkish, and I wonder if Han has similar features. Or, asking it differently, if I replaces only the lexer to another lexer recognizing a different script, will it not work?
Honest answer: right now it's mostly a keyword translation with English-like syntax order. Korean is SOV (subject-object-verb) but Han follows English SVO order — 목록.추가(값) reads like "list.add(value)" not the Korean natural order. Changing that would require a fundamentally different syntax design, which is an interesting challenge for the future.
That said, a few things do lean into Korean specifically:
- Method names are real Korean verbs: .추가() (add), .삭제() (delete), .분리() (split)
- Error messages are in Korean
- The REPL prompt is 한> and exit command is 나가기 (literally "go out")
Good question — it pushed me to think about what makes this more than just s/function/함수/g.