Could Lua itself become UTF8-aware?

[Gé Weijers <ge@...>]

On Sunday, April 30, 2017, Rain Gloom <raingloom42@gmail.com> wrote:

> Solves most of our issues.

I've never seen any useful program that used UTF-8 in identifiers, using it for string processing would make sense, but things like typing π instead of pi will just complicate writing and parsing. Because of that, I must ask: what _are_ those issues?

The biggest issue is that people want to use other languages, especially now coding classes for teenagers are in fashion. My first programming classes (college level) expected Dutch for names of identifiers, which was easy enough, you just leave off a few diacritical marks here and there, but that won't work for Greek, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Ugaritic (Lua in cuneiform on clay tablets, anyone?) etc. etc. What's wrong with:

function 解決問題 ()

end

This is not a trivial exercise to get right, I'm not sure that just pretending any Unicode glyph from 0x80 on up is a 'letter' is sufficient.

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