Re: Could Lua itself become UTF8-aware?

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> > What is wrong with
> > 
> > function   ()
> > end
> 
>   Again, missing character in font.
> 
> > or
> > 
> > function functiοn ()
> > end
> > ?
> 
>   There was a long discussion about that a few years ago:
> 
> 	http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2014-04/msg01226.html

There is no missing character in font nor keywords being used as
identifiers. Both | | ("en quad", a kind of white space) and
|functiοn| (with a omicron for "ο") would be valid identifiers with
the proposal (accept everything above 127 as valid in identifiers).

I want to be very clear that I am not against Unicode, quite the
opposite. However, "accept everything above 127 as valid in identifiers"
is quite different from supporting Unicode (again, it is quite the
opposite). For data, the Lua approach is that it gives a very basic
support and leave the rest for specialized libraries. Several programs
have been using Lua with Unicode quite successful (e.g., Lightroom and
LuaTeX).

However, the Lua lexer should not depend on libraries. It would be great
if the lexer could handle Unicode (correctly!), but I don't know how to
do it without at least doubling the size of Lua. To do it (very) broken,
I prefer to keep it as it is.

-- Roberto