Joachim Durchholz wrote: > Chris Uppal schrieb: >> Joachim Durchholz wrote: >> >>>> This is implementation-defined in C. A compiler is allowed to accept >>>> variable names with alphabetic Unicode characters outside of ASCII. >>> >>> Hmm... that could would be nonportable, so C support for Unicode is >>> half-baked at best. >> >> Since the interpretation of characters which are yet to be added to >> Unicode is undefined (will they be digits, "letters", operators, symbol, >> punctuation.... ?), there doesn't seem to be any sane way that a >> language could allow an unrestricted choice of Unicode in identifiers. > > I don't think this is a problem in practice. E.g. if a language uses the > usual definition for identifiers (first letter, then letters/digits), > you end up with a language that changes its definition on the whims of > the Unicode consortium, but that's less of a problem than one might > think at first.
It is not a problem at all. See the stability policies in <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr31/tr31-2.html>. > Actually I'm not sure that Unicode is important for long-lived code. > Code tends to not survive very long unless it's written in English, in > which case anything outside of strings is in 7-bit ASCII. So the > majority of code won't ever be affected by Unicode problems - Unicode is > more a way of lowering entry barriers. Unicode in identifiers has certainly been less important than some thought it would be -- and not at all important for open source projects, for example, which essentially have to use English to get the widest possible participation. -- David Hopwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
