+١ (Arabic 1) Many people that program do not speak english and have difficulty distinguishing, typing, and working with english letters and digits. English terms and english transliterations of their native language do not work well for them There is no reason to restrict identifiers to English letters and digits, just because they are handy and meaningful to you. For readability and maintainability of code, it is important to allow people to use meaningful terms. The code in question may never be distributed worldwide, and in fact may only be used by people that know the author's native language.
And fwiw, it reduces the cost of programmers, since hiring someone who knows PHP and can work with English requires more skills than someone who knows PHP and works in the native language. For those of you that love PHP and want to see it remain successful and utilized, localized identifiers makes it more competitive and productive. My last trip to Asia, in both Korea and Taiwan, I saw translations of books on PHP, so they do learn about PHP in their native language. Imagine implementing some complicated workflow or other process or algorithm, where each step has a name in the local language, and as a programmer, you have to come up with a meaningless (to you) string to represent it, and having to support that code... Tex Texin Internationalization Architect, Yahoo! Inc. > -----Original Message----- > From: Andi Gutmans [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2005 3:28 PM > To: Andrei Zmievski; Rasmus Lerdorf > Cc: Ilia Alshanetsky; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; internals > Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP6, Unicode for language functions, > classes,methods, vars names > > > Me too... > > At 09:16 AM 9/13/2005, Andrei Zmievski wrote: > >Yep, what Rasmus said. > > > >-Andrei > > > >On Sep 13, 2005, at 6:25 AM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: > > > >>Ilia Alshanetsky wrote: > >>>Pierre Joye wrote: > >>> > >>>>is not something I like to see. For language constructs, I would > >>>>really like to have only ASCII support... > >>> > >>> > >>>+1 IMHO language identifiers should be limited to ASCII. > Yes you can > >>>+now > >>>use language specific chars by changing the locale, so > that ž, Ä, ÿ > >>>are taken, but that hardly makes for portable code. > >> > >>What do you mean? Why wouldn't it be portable? Because you can't > >>read it? It will still run. Limiting identifiers to ASCII is an > >>artificial limitation as far as I am concerned. I see no > reason for > >>it. It's not as if people are going to suddenly write code for > >>distribution with all sorts of weird unicode identifiers. > We support > >>high-ascii today and you never see those in public code. > Java has had > >>unicode identifiers forever as well, and it doesn't seem to be a > >>problem for them. > >> > >>For people writing localized code it is very nice to be able to use > >>descriptive identifiers in their own character set. It > makes it much > >>easier to understand the code for them. > >> > >>-Rasmus > >> > >>-- > >>PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > >>To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > > >-- > >PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > >To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > > -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
