Re: Unicode in source code. WHY?

From: Markus Kuhn (Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 20 1999 - 10:43:57 EDT


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.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>



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