Re: RFE: Please allow unicode ID chars in identifiers

[L A Walsh]

Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 01, 2017 at 09:31:24PM -0700, L A Walsh wrote:
>   
> > Variable names like:
> >
> > L??v -- (3 letter word pronounced like Leave), (most recent try...)
> >     
>
> Here is a demonstration of the cost of what you are proposing.  In my
> mail user agent, your variable shows up as L??v.
>
> Source code with your UTF-8 identifiers would no longer even be READABLE
> on systems that do not use UTF-8.  Like the system I am using RIGHT NOW,
> which uses Latin-1.  But also like Windows systems using WIN1252, Asian
> systems using Big5, etc.
>
> Maybe you can try again after 2038, which will probably take out most
> of these old systems.  Perhaps then the world will actually be capable
> of moving beyond ASCII as a UNIVERSAL encoding.  Today, we're not.
>
>   
That's ok... I want to "encrypt" and/or obfuscate my code... ;-)

Seriously, if it was representable in your latin-1, you could
run iconv over it.

That particular example should translate to latin-1 w/no problem.

As for unsupported systems, there is a reason they are no longer
supported.  The world is already using UTF-8.  It's only a few
luddites clinging to ascii as a last refuge. ;-)

What display/OS do you have that you can't run UTF-8 on?

linux systems and windows systems have had UTF-8 for at least the
last 7 years or more.