Dr. Muhammad Ali Yousuf's Page on Computer and Human Languages

Computer Languages

Some of my students have pointed out that they were expecting to see lectures / tutorials on computer languages (programming, scripting, markup, etc.) when the clicked on this tab. But what I had initially placed here were links to human laguages. To remedy this, I have added links to some of the major computer languages. I usually don't teach computer programming as such. They are usually part of a course. For example Java in a simulations course, or C++ in a course on Data Structures, etc.

1. ActiveX Data Objects
2. Assembly Language for the IBM PC/XT
3. ASP (Active Server Pages)
4. C
5. C++
6. COBOL (COmmercial Business Oriented Language)
7. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
8. DOS Batch Scripts
9. DHTML (Dynamic HTML) (I have no understanding of this)
10. FORTRAN 77 (FORmula Translation) and FORTRAN 90
11. HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
12. Java
13. Java Script
14. Pascal
15. Perl (I have no understanding of this)
16. Python
17. SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)
18. SQL and PL/SQL
19. Tex and LaTeX
20. UML (Unified Modelling Language)
21. VBScript
22. Visual Basic (I have no understanding of this, I only know GWBASIC!)
23. Visual PROLOG
24. VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language)
25. WAP / WML (Wireless Access Protocol / Wireless Markup Lanugage)
26. WML Script
27. XHTML (eXtensible HTML)
28. XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
29. XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language)

Human Languages

I am a native speaker of Urdu and a next-to-native speaker of English. I can also understand Sindhi (the language of the province of Sind in Pakistan, where I was born), Punjabi (the language of the province of Punjab in Pakistan, where I got my higher education) and Italian (the language of Italy, where I did my masters). I can also read and write Arabic and Persian but my vocabulary in these two languages is very limited. I have started developing this page to share the information that I have collected over the years for these languages and for various software tools available for typesetting in these languages.

1. Urdu
2. English
3. Spanish
4. Italian
5. Sindhi
6. Punjabi
7. Arabic
8. Persian
9. Korean

A word of caution: I have found that many of the online automatic translation tools and even downloadable software, make wrong translations. The reason is more cultural than technical. For example, for many of the common sentences in English, there is no equivalent thing available in Spanish. A native speaker would probably use a different sentence on the same occasion. The same thing happens with other languages.