[OT] Re: Allow UTF8 value names in lua?

[Chris Smith <space.dandy@...>]

> On 29 Oct 2019, at 05:45, bil til <flyer31@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I think really main target are the Chinese. The "standard Chinese" really
> need their writing very much, as the languages in China are extremely
> different in speaking, but the language unites them - this has been in China
> like this for many 1000 years... . Further from my China travels I have the
> impression that the basic Chinese writing "for daily use" is extremely
> efficient, takes typically much less space than western phonetic writing.

It is very spatially efficient for relatively long words because it is very graphically complex, but quite inefficient for short words due to the ambiguity of each character — a character normally represents a concept and you typically need at two characters to form a defined word. In terms of human input it is less efficient than romanised languages, since the only practical way of entering characters is to type the romanised form and manually select the correct characters from a list.

Its graphical complexity alone makes it inappropriate for this use, in my view. I’ve spent hours debug COBOL that wasn’t working because a full stop was in the wrong place; I can’t imagine the pain of debugging Lua code that isn’t working because the character for a variable in one place has the wrong radical, making it an entirely different variable!

Chris