Many of the early pioneers of computer science, such as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, were British and came from a time when communication was much more civilised than now and letter writing was commonplace. Whilst most programming languages today use a subset of English for their keywords, the terse conciseness of modern code would make it very alien to those early developers. This short script goes some way to solving this problem, allowing the user to write a computer programme in a manner much more becoming an English gentleman or lady.

The mappings from Gentlemanly PHP to actual PHP can be seen in the source code, defined in the $syntax array. A file containing Gentlemanly PHP code can be passed to the interpreter, which will by default evaluate the code and write a 'proper' PHP version to a separate file. To evaluate and translate a file instructions.gphp to instructions.php, use:

php interpreter.php instructions.gphp

To prevent the evaluation of the code, and to save the translated version to a file called translated.php, use:

php interpreter.php --eval=false --outfile=translated.php instructions.gphp

Instructions to the interpreter take the form of a letter, and so must have a correct salutation and sign-off. The interpreter will use the name at the end of the letter to address the user and so one should sign-off in the manner that one would wish to be addressed. For example, the canonical Hello World programme would be:

Dear Interpreter,

Proclaim "Hello world!";

Yours sincerely,
<your name here>

This was started after reading the entertaining article If PHP were British, by Dave Child.