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

[Kenneth Forsbäck <kenneth.forsback@...>]

Yes, I am familiar with the problems of chinese transliteration, 
although I don't speak chinese. Japanese is my thing ^^

I guess you could call it the least-common-denominator or something. Not 
that I want to force them into something that for them is very 
inconvenient. With 1330 million cizitens, I guess programming with hanji 
names wouldn't be too bad, but I am still worried about "accessibility" 
and "shareability".

As I said, keep it as simple as possible. If UTF-8 becomes valid for 
names, how are those who don't speak chinese going to use the code? How 
about rules for what is valid and what is not? Will there be a auxiliary 
program that can easily convert from hanji to latin characters? What 
about readability?

Even though I'm Finnish (with Swedish mothertongue, but also fluent in 
Finnish) I have *never* used neither Finnish nor Swedish identifiers. 
Even back in primary school when I first started with my 386 and qbasic, 
it was always English. In my oppinion, the first and foremost important 
aspect of programming is sharing.

Sure, if it's closed source I couldn't care less.

However, if you allow UTF-8 you need to be prepared to deal with all the 
problems it is going to present. If you do so, then great, it might not 
be a total failure after all. HOWEVER, if you go into this half-arsedly, 
without proper understanding of the scale of such a project, it is only 
going to cause more trouble than solve anything.

Kenneth

David Given wrote:
> 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?