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

["GrayFace" <sergroj@...>]

I'm Russian. IMO, there's no way for a programmer to escape learning English 
at least on a basic level. There's much documentation in English, 'big 
bosses' are usually from a foreign country. Writing identifiers in English 
is the very least you can learn. Not to mention we all study English at 
school.






----- Original Message ----- 
From: David Given
To: Lua list
Sent: Monday, October 05, 2009 7:51 PM
Subject: Re: UTF-8 identifiers [was: Re: Lua t-shirts]


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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