An international visual language

The authors present an experiment supporting the thesis that visual languages are well suited for programmers whose native language is not English. They first analyze the particular problems of the target group, Arabic speakers, in comprehending Pascal program structures and present a number of previously proposed solutions to this problem. They present their own solution, a visual programming environment in which all syntactic and nearly all semantic information is presented in a BLOX-like notation. Only labels variable names, expressions, and comments are presented textually, in Arabic. Finally, they present the results of an experiment in which the system received a high degree of acceptance among Arab speakers