mainHindawi Vernacular Programming System - Summary

 
 
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System Name: hindawi
Name: Hindawi Vernacular Programming System
Group Type: non-GNU software and documentation

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This group is not part of the GNU Project.

Hindawi is the first ever suite of open-source programming languages for Indian vernaculars. It includes equivalents of C, C++, lex, yacc, assembly etc. in Hindi, Bangla and other vernaculars.

These projects have won Computer Society of India's Young IT Professional Award (Eastern region) 2005 (Winner) and 2004 (Special mention), two years in a row.

Some of the innovations of this project include a system for displaying Indic scripts in "true" text-mode. This is done without using any aditional hardware. At no point has any graphical (rasterising) method been used for this. All the required glyphs have been accomodated in the extended ASCII code page, leaving 7-bit ASCII unaltered. This method is applicable to all Brahmi derived composite syllabic Indian scripts. Hindi, Bangla, Assamese and Gujrati scripts have been implemented. Oriya and Punjabi are under development. There are strong suggestions that this may be applicable for South Indian scripts as well. This has made it possible to have BIOS/POST in Indic. Besides, this system being free, it does not add to the procurement cost as compared to commercial products.

Another contribution of this project includes a "case and diacritic independent, compiler acceptable" transliteration system. This is completely invertible and is applicable to all Indian languages. This has direct mapping to the IPA and, hence, may be used to develop programming languages in "any" human language. It also has bearings on web technology,  as it can allow Indic URLs in IPv4 as well. It may be used to encode even static web-pages, such that if someone does not have the required fonts then one may see the Indic web-page in Roman script transliteration, instead of "boxes" (unicode) or garbage (other encodings), from the same "static" html.

Finally, the task of Indic programming language design has not been trivial either. Support for HP printers is included, other drivers will be added soon. The system uses GCC as back-end and is highly portable. There is both ISCII and UNICODE support for all languages, including Hindi/Bangla DOS and the IDE. Necessary filters have been provided for conversions between ISCII, Romenagri, UNICODE, APCISR, HP-PCL(printing on HP printers) etc. The languages have been developed synchronically and, hence, there is a certain level of homogenity in keyword selection across paradigms. The programs written in Indic programming languages are readily converted to their English equivalents and hence may be delivered internationally. There is also support for translation of variable names and rudimentary literate programming. Unreleased languages include Lisp, Prolog, Ada, Pascal, Fortran etc. in Inian vernaculars. They shall be released soon, after the initial testing and verification of license issues. However the availability of lex and yacc makes the issues of targeting specific lanuages quite trivial, and these are already available for download along with C, C++, assembly, BASIC, logo, and Java in Hindi and Bangla.

Technologically, Hindi/Bangla C/C++/assembly have been used for robotics and cluster super-computers. Along with this system, also released in public domain is the design of a natural-interfaced autonomous robot. The languages have also been used to successfully implement a Beowulf cluster. Effort is now being made towards porting Linux kernel sources to Hindi/Bangla C, asm etc. This is aided by the fact that also included are English-programming-language to Hindi/Bangla-programming-language translators and vice-versa.

Registration Date: Thu 29 Dec 2005 11:43:49 PM UTC
License: GNU General Public License v2 or later
Development Status: 0 - Undefined

 

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