Re: Unicode in source code. WHY?

From: Torsten Mohrin (mohrin@sharmahd.com)
Date: Wed Jul 21 1999 - 09:13:25 EDT


On Tue, 20 Jul 1999 23:29:20 -0700 (PDT), Doug Ewell wrote:

>My personal opinion is that programming languages should allow non-
>ASCII, non-Latin characters in variable names, and it should be the
>responsibility of *each company or programming group* to establish its
>own in-house standards. In other words, if Torsten wants everyone at
>Sharmahd to write in ASCII and English, that is his right and may be a
>good in-house policy; but to say that the language should forbid anyone
>from doing otherwise sounds excessive.

I've learned from this discussion that there is real need for using
Unicode in programming language identifiers. I didn't expect it,
because all projects I were involved in, were either German or
multinational. In the latter case we used English. And even a lot of
German projects were English based (source code and sometimes
documentation).

Of course, I do *not* want to restrict the whole world to use only
"ASCII based" identifiers. But, I still doubt that using Unicode in
identifiers would improve software quality. As a consequence
programming language keywords have to be translated. It would
introduce more problems than it solves.

I'm more concerned about the fact that I can't use Unicode string
literals in source code, right now!

--
Torsten Mohrin
Sharmahd Computing GmbH, Hannover, Germany
Phone: +49-511-13780, Fax: +49-511-13450
http://www.sharmahd.com, mohrin@sharmahd.com



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