Re: Internationalisation in programming languages [Was Re: lex patch]

[Edgar Toernig <froese@...>]

RLake@oxfam.org.uk wrote:
> 
> [...] In fact, I'd go for something even more radical: if it's
> not a reserved symbol and it prints, it's a valid identifier character.

How do you know whether "it prints"?  Characters that are printable on
one system may be control characters on another (i.e. 0x7f-0xa0 range;
even 0x00-0x1f holds printable characters on some systems).

> Leaving all that aside, there is no earthly reason why I shouldn't use
> whatever character makes me feel good inside of an identifier, providing
> that it's not being used by the language for some other purpose. Given that
> I use iso-8859-1, why should I not use «foo» as an identifier? (perhaps I
> like global variables to stand out.) Does this hurt anything?

First you flame about people using locale specific features and now that? ;-)

I want to see you when you get the first file from a system that uses smileys,
playing card symbols, or an em-dash within identifiers *g*.

IMHO, a programming language should use a well defined and system independent
character set.  The characters which may be used in Lua identifiers is
undefined and system dependent.  Bad.

Ciao, ET.