Re: Allowing non-ASCII identifiers

From: Scott David Daniels (Scott.Daniels_at_Acm.Org)
Date: 02/12/04 

Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 16:18:16 -0800

Dietrich Epp wrote:

> You could require that all identifiers be the canonically decomposed
> Unicode representations encoded into UTF-8. This would mean that no
> matter which string is chosen from the above, the result is always the
> same sequence of characters. This is how many filesystems use unicode,
> i.e., Mac HFS+ works this way (but filesystems usually also require a
> specific version of Unicode for backwards compatibility).
There are several "Normal forms" for Unicode letters. You'd need to
choose one.

> I personally think that Unicode identifiers would be catastrophic.....
{lotsa examples, some good, some not-so-good elided)
I'm reluctant to endorse it because I _know_ I'll see "Why doesn't my
program work?" accompanied by characters I'm not used to distinguishing.

> I think the assumption some people have is that Unicode will only ever
> be used for things that are like the roman alphabet: adding diacritical
> marks, etc. It sounds like the most worthless extension ever, and the
> only language I think of when I think of special characters is Intercal.
And this is why I had to comment. You obviously never dealt with APL.
I actually used it without an APL type ball, which was painful in the
extreme. When I give language summaries, my quote for APL is,
"APL is the only language where you regularly see one programmer walk
into another's office (well, cube now, but in the day....) and say,
'I bet you cannot guess what this one-line program does.'" 

-- 
-Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels@Acm.Org

Relevant Pages

  • =?windows-1252?Q?Encrypting_Unicode_=96_Using_ASCII_as_a_Surrogate_Al?= =?windows-1252?Q?pha
    ... characters of an exotic eastern language using an ASCII keyboard. ... It is true to say that any keyboard of any language can be simulated ... communicate in large volume with China or Japan using CJK from Unicode ... by the computer as an external file and enciphered by a stream cipher ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • RE: VBA question: How to extract cell values in different language
    ... language is entered, but it seems like all that data is lost when the VBA ... about having binary data and not unicode data confirms my suspicions. ... You are have 256 binary characters. ... First column has the string IDs ...
    (microsoft.public.excel.programming)
  • Re: APL Idiom?
    ... what with language tags and automatic language recognition, but I doubt if these efforts will ever extend to include APL] ... If you encode your posts using Unicode, and if the readers have fonts which include glyphs for the APL characters, this problem is already solved. ...
    (comp.lang.apl)
  • Re: Wow Im reading about APL seems great but where do I get that keyboard?
    ... I was careful to restrict my suggestion to code exchange, such as FinnAPL's library, so I cannot see how this related to the effort required to build an interpreter? ... APL vendors cannot ignore Unicode, they know it and progress is being made ... APL does not yet require more than 256 characters. ...
    (comp.lang.apl)
  • Re: font/unicode question
    ... Do you have the Japanese language installed? ... Do you have the Japanese keyboard layout or Input Method Editor ... characters or spelling checkers designed for different languages. ... They appear to be solely Unicode. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)