It was about a couple of years ago when I happened to attend a presentation made by Abhishek Chaudhary at Sarai office. Abhishek is an unassuming gentleman and a robotics engineer. He was making a presentation about one of his projects and I was so impressed with his innovative endeavor that I promised him to write about his project. Although, one or the other thing kept me from writing about Abhishek’s project but it has been on my mind ever since. Today, I decided to write a short note on this excellent project. Abhishek Chaudhary and Dr. Shweta Chaudhary have developed Hindawi Programming System (HPS); a suite that allows users to program in Indic languages (Hindi, Bangla and Gujarati at present). The developers have made HPS open source and it is available free of cost through their website. It could be used on Linux, DOS and Windows operating systems. Using Hindawi, even a non-English literate person can do computer programming in the following languages (or Shailee, as a language is referred to as in HPS):
BASIC (called Shaillee Prathamik) LOGO (called Shaillee Prathamik) Assembly (called Shaillee Yantrik) Lex (called Shaillee Shabda) Yacc (called Shaillee Vyaakaran) C (called Shaillee Guru) C++ (called Shaillee Shreni) Shailee Kritrim (an Indic programming language targeting Java Virtual Machine)
Hindawi first transliterates the source code into a compiler acceptable format and then uses an existing compiler to produce machine code. This tool could be of great use in the times to come. Indians who find it difficult to grasp English would be able to train on programming languages using HPS. A lot of kids who study in Hindi medium schools (and don’t know much about English) would be able to write commands for computers. Even if these kids don’t want to be software developers –they can at least easily understand how computers work using these programming languages in their mother tongue. The impressive thing about Hindawi is that it uses the existing compiler to compile the source code. The source code is written in Hindi. These Indic programming languages are new entities and are NOT merely an Indic interface for existing equivalent languages. Have a look at the following example: Do you find it interesting to be able to write programs in Hindi? Please share your views on this. I hope it was useful for you. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions on this topic. I will be happy to try and help you. Thank you for using TechWelkin.
