From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Oct 24 2005 - 14:59:41 CST
On 10/24/2005 5:53 AM, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> Would you really do that so much blindly? This would mean importing
> tend of thousands of identifiers in your program, which would cause
> much more conflicts. If they are imported in a namespace, this will
> clutter your program for nothing, with excessive and unneeded
> compilation time due to the creation of management of large symbol
> tables filled by your generated names and the true identifiers used by
> your application or by imported system identifiers.
Only one programming language commonly in use doesn't do namespaces,
so the conflict of names with other names is not a concern. Just stdio
on some systems can drag in 20,000 lines of headers, and I would
expect simple constants to be quicker to process than what's in those
20,000 lines.
> Really you will define carefully only some identifiers for characters
> you need to reference specifically in your program, and the name will
> you choose for those identifiers has no link to the ISO/IEC 10646
> normative character name. You will define its value to the codepoint.
> So you don't need those character names. Really.
No, actually, my programming language (Ada) defines identifiers for
all the Latin-1 characters, and I see no reason not to define standard
identifiers for all the Unicode letters. It reduces the number of bugs
where programmers disagree about which character
Unicode.Quotation_Mark is, or where programmers define
Latin_Capital_Letter_N_With_Long_Right_Leg to be 16#0202#. Standard
libraries are better tested, and when they have bugs, they only need
to be fixed once.
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