Mark Davis wrote:
> Apostrophe, hyphen, and various other puncutation by default continue
> a word, but this behavior may be overriden on a per-language basis.
This may work for things such as finding word boundaries, but not for
identifiers.
According to the ID_Start and ID_Continue properties in
<http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/DerivedCoreProperties.txt>, neither
U+0027 (APOSTROPHE) nor U+2019 (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK) are allowed in
an identifier. And this is not surprising, since they are primarily
quotation marks.
On the other hand, U+02BC (MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE) is allowed in any
position within an identifier. Using U+02BC as the apostrophe, would allow
to use words such as: <students'>, <isn't> or <'em> in identifiers.
But this hits against the fact that Unicode's own suggestion is to use
U+2019 for the apostrophe.
BTW, in my language the apostrophe is not used only for optional
contractions: it is mandatory in some aspects of orthography, e.g. for the
imperatives of some verbs. For instance, the Italian for <go> (imperative)
is <va'> -- and I don't need to explain why programmers prefer imperatives
for naming procedures...
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Mar 26 2002 - 12:22:18 EST