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

[David Given <dg@...>]

Kenneth Forsbäck wrote:
> If these would-be programmers are so young they have problems using 
> Latin/ASCII, then they shouldn't be learning Lua, or any other 
> programming language for that matter.

You're assuming that they speak a language with an easily latinised 
form. That's not necessarily the case. You look like you're Finnish --- 
Finnish uses accented characters, but you can easily force it into ASCII 
and produce comprehensible approximations of Finnish words that you can 
use in identifiers.

But the same doesn't apply to Chinese, for example. Chinese 
latinisations are notoriously horrible; there are several conflicting 
versions (did you know that Beijing and Peking are *the same word*?).

And besides, why should they have to? Why shouldn't they use their 
native language to write their code in? Why force them to use an alien 
alphabet just so that they can use Lua? Why make them do things *our* 
way, when such a tiny change would let them do things *their* way, in 
the way they find most comfortable?

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