I agree with all of your observations (just imagine: I get to Unicode enable
this stuff!!)
My point is: if the tools would support Unicode then we could work more
easily with string literals (including test case data such as U+5c6e or
U+2222). We could work with (and correct) localized resources in the
environment. We could translate identifiers that get expressed to the end
user (Bad programmer, no biscuit!). Lots of things would be possible.
Instead I get to fart around with braindead environments or switch to the
Japanese machine "just because" I'm working on Japanese.
Why?
Because the vigigoths who write programming tools won't support Unicode
because programmers might use a expression that doesn't use ASCII in an
identifier and this means fixing the parser. (No offence to living or dead
Gothic societies.)
I frankly don't want to see all sorts of clever usage in code, but why not
allow mature programmers who wish it to name a variable "Numéro_de_réseau"??
Is it going to hurt me that much??
Addison
-----Original Message-----
From: Geoffrey Waigh [mailto:anzu@home.com]
Sent: mardi 20 juillet 1999 14:20
To: Unicode List
Subject: Re: Unicode in source code. WHY?
Addison Phillips wrote:
>
> Certainly there will be developers who code "features" of dubious utility
> into their code that way too, but, hey, they have to maintain it.
>
Thinking back on the various working environments I've been in,
four of them explicitly had maintenance done by a separate group
than the "developers." Three others encouraged developers to
look after their own code until they left the organization
whereupon someone else inherited it. Some of those heaps of
code I and my colleagues have been handed have been nightmares
of maintainability. I dread every new tool that is created
to aid the forces of obscurity.
I have visions of dealing with programs 15 years from now that
are written in 10 scripts and 23 languages. For a moment I
thought translation software could salvage this, but I already
have to wade through horribly ungrammatical/misspelt (in their
native language,) code and it doesn't do much for abbreviations.
Geoffrey
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