Responding to Markus ...
| Torsten Mohrin wrote on 1999-07-20 13:54 UTC:
| > Can someone give me at least one really good reason, why I should use
| > Unicode in identifiers in programming languages? What's wrong with
| > English and ASCII (and I mean "ASCII") and [A-Za-z_] ?
|
| The fact that Ada95 does allow Latin-1 characters in identifiers has
| probably to do with some strange French government regulations with a
| rather dim view on French government employees using the wrong
| language (which happens to refer to any language but French) for
| documenting their work.
|
| > UCNs are a good idea, e.g. in string literals, regular expression,
| > resource files, config files and so on. But, IMHO, it's a very stupid
| > idea to use Unicode characters in identifiers.
|
| Agreed.
So, you find no problem with speakers of Romance languages using
identifiers in their native language, but you draw the line at Slavic
speakers doing the same?
I'm sure that makes perfect sense if you live on that small island
off the coast of Europe ...
| "Jonathan Coxhead" wrote on 1999-07-20 02:01 UTC:
| >
| > I'm also amused
| > by the idea of defining 'operator \u2295', and writing expressions with
| > CIRCLED PLUS, and the other Unicode operator symbols, though that's not
| > on the horizon at the moment.
|
| If you like ideographic programming languages with ideotic keyboard
| requirements, try APL first.
Thanks for the advice. (As it happens, I don't.)
But if you read, e g, the functional programming literature, you
will find new operators being introduced all the time: ++ for list
concatenation, . for function composition, <- for set membership, |->
for "maps to". These were all chosen because of their resemblance to
various mathematical operator symbols. All of them would be more
clearly expressed if the source character set was not limited to
ASCII.
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o o o (_|/
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