alt Hacker NewsThe submitted title
> The 'else' keyword is probably a literal translation from German (2020)
is editorialised, inaccurate, and very misleading.
The actual title: “if … then … else had to be invented!”
And the content doesn’t say anything about it being a literal translation from German; rather:
> What they do say is that this document was originally written in German and hastily translated into English. I think a carefully-chosen German word was probably translated as an archaic English word and then never revisited.
Wild speculation, and definitely nothing about literality of translation.
As for the author’s description of it being archaic, well, I’d call that misleading too. Bare “else”, arguably (definitely not colloquial in most dialects), but as “or else”, perfectly current.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me that someone considered the options, decided “otherwise”, “or else” too wordy and confusing in its own way, and so settled on bare “else” as the best choice (which I think it is), not how people mostly speak, but perfectly legitimate, and concise.
(In other words: I think we’d have settled on “else” even without the possible German step. This too is speculation, of course.)
Replies
I can't think of anything else.
I would expect there''s plenty of pre-computer media with phrasing along the lines of "Do/don't do X, or else Y will happen."
The most likely German candidate would be 'sonst', which would be both in common use and short enough for a programming language keyword. E.g. the most likely option for 'if-then-else' is 'wenn-dann-sonst', assuming that German-origin theory is right of course.
One thing that's mostly forgotten today is that German had a very rich 'corpus' of wonderful nerdy computer science words up until the 1990s which unfortunately has fallen out of fashion. Nowadays it's a pretty terrible 'pidgin dialect' when Germans talk about programming and computers to each other (to a point where it's much less awkward to just speak English in the first place lol).