Re: UTF-8 identifiers [was: Re: Lua t-shirts]

[Philippe Lhoste <PhiLho@...>]

On 05/10/2009 12:05, David Given wrote:
> It shouldn't be! 

It is here from the start, and documented:

"Lexical Conventions: (The definition of letter depends on the current locale: any 
character considered alphabetic by the current locale can be used in an identifier.)"

> It should be using the C locale for all code-related 
> parsing --- languages should never, ever, under *any* circumstances, 
> change their behaviour depending on locale!

It has always been a controversial point, but in practice most users discipline themselves 
and stick to Ascii...

I believe the historical reason for this choice goes back when Lua was used as data 
metalanguage: it allows to use locale names as keys for tables:

a = { Roméo = "Juliette", César = "Brutus" }

Although I cannot test that because it seems that on Windows it defaults to C locale and 
refuses to change (unless I am doing something wrong).
I tried with Web Lua but it doesn't expose os table (I can understand why...).
Ah, I can do that in Lua.org live demo but I still can't change the locale.
Perhaps I am doing something wrong?

--
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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