Towards the Development of a Token Recognizer for a Yorùbá-based Programming Language

Experimental development of a programming language that uses the lexicons of the Yoruba language has been attempted. This was done in the belief that an indigenous African language-based programming language would enhance the comprehension of computer-based problem-solving processes by indigenous students and teachers. However, the modern orthography of the base language was not considered in the implementation of the programming language. The orthography of a standard Yoruba language consists of the basic alphabets of the language as well as some diacritical marks whose presence or otherwise indicate the pronunciation of an alphabet. The present study is on the development of a token recognizer for a Yoruba-based programming language that takes into cognizance the modern orthography of the base language. Yoruba is one of the indigenous African languages, being the first language of more than 30 million people in the southwest of Nigeria.; and spoken by more than 100 million people globally. Appropriate regular expressions were designed to specify the lexical structure of the Yoruba-based programming language, a state transition diagram was also drawn to show how the basic tokens of the language in a given source program will be recognized, while implementation of the system would be carried out using Python programming language. In readiness for the actual implementation of the system, the expected output of a correct modern Yoruba token recognizer is presented in this paper.