Re: people working in Greg's locale (+euro) & display of Unicode names

[PePa]

On 15/06/2560 22:03, Chet Ramey wrote:
> I don't know other languages well enough to point one out, but I can easily
> imagine that a particular character is an "alphabetic" in, say, Mandarin,
> but doesn't exist in someone's en_US character set.

I though you were referring to a character existing in both sets.
This is the reason why I think you should only concern yourself with
characters that already have an established semantic in bash. Don't get
bogged down in distinguishing classes in myriads of character sets. Just
allow anything that isn't ASCII (but IS UTF-8 -- I'm talking about
UTF-8, otherwise this discussion becomes impossible).

> I see a number of problems with using non-alphanumerics in shell
> identifiers.  The real advantage to allowing this is to allow users to
> put alphabetics from their own locales into shell identifiers.  There's
> little reason to do it otherwise, and plenty of complications.

What are those problems and complications??

> As for the implementation, it's much easier to use isalpha/isdigit (and
> their wide character equivalents) than to try and keep track of a blacklist
> of characters across different locales.

I don't propose blacklists across locales, just blacklisting what
already has an established meaning in bash, ie. ASCII. All the rest is
just fair game, if someone insists on using a thumbs-up icon in a
variable name, why restrict that?? The restricting and policing is going
to make this costly in terms of developer time and CPU time.

Peter