Re: Would lua support varaible name with non-ascii characters?

[Tim Hill <drtimhill@...>]

> On Oct 16, 2018, at 10:11 AM, Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it> wrote:
> 
> On 16/10/2018 15:18, Viacheslav Usov wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 16, 2018 at 2:58 PM Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> Now, imagine an identifier like B10010100, where each individual
>> "character" is in fact a different "version" of a "0" or a "1". Nightmare!
>> 
>> Especially in Lua, which happily treats any unknown identifier as a valid
>> global variable.
>> 
>> oоοｏ𝖔
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> V.
>> 
> Yepp!!
> 
> And since there are few fonts (AFAIK) that cover the entire UNICODE set, we will need editors capable of automatically rendering source code by mixing and matching different glyphs from different fonts.
> 
> Word processors for source code, anyone? (*Ouch!*)
> 
> Imagine: use a ~1GB application to write a ~100 lines script (~1kB source code) of a language whose implementation is ~1MB. That's minimalism! :-)
> 
> Moreover, the same editors will have to be also hex-editors (*Urgh!*), because we will need the ability to look at the actual encoding of glyphs to discriminate those visually-ambiguous identifiers (something that is so easy in ASCII, e.g. by switching to a monospaced font).
> 
> Then the same editor would need the ability to map the encoding to its standard UNICODE representation, just because otherwise we would also need to remember all the possible UTF-8 sequences and their meanings. (*Arghh!!*)
> 
> Then....
> 
> The more I think about it, the more it seems a possible representation of Hell (in the biblical sense) for a programmer. Spend the eternity learning every UTF-8 sequence, its mapping to code-points and their possible visual representation with glyphs in an infinite number of fonts which never can represent the whole UNICODE plane-set.
> 
> In comparison solving the halting problem is just purgatory! (*<grin>*)
> 
> There are up sides, though. Imagine how many nice and mind-boggling pranks you could do to your colleague programmers! :-]]
> 
> Cheers! :-D
> 
> -- Lorenzo
> 
> 


Unicode (noun): A character encoding system designed to make code pages look sensible.

—Tim