Re: Patch for unicode in varnames...

[Greg Wooledge]

On Tue, Jun 06, 2017 at 07:01:23AM -0700, L A Walsh wrote:
> George wrote:
> >On Mon, 2017-06-05 at 16:16 -0700, L A Walsh wrote:
> >>George wrote:
> >>>On Mon, 2017-06-05 at 15:59 +0700, Peter & Kelly Passchier wrote:
> >>>>On 05/06/2560 15:52, George wrote:
> >>>>>there's not a reliable mechanism in place to run a script in a 
> >>>>>locale whose character encoding doesn't match that of the script 

>    Right.  The 1st paragraph (written by you), above, mentions that. 
> Given the 1st paragraph (which no one is contesting), we are only
> talking about the case where the run locale and script locale are the same.

You need someone to explicit say it?  OK, I'll say it.

Scripts that can only *run* in a UTF-8 encoding-locale are a bad idea.
The whole world is not UTF-8, despite what a few people seem to think.

That's in addition to all of the issues that arise when trying to *edit*
a script that was written in one or more character set encodings that
are different from yours.  One could almost make a viable case that
"only people on UTF-8 computers are allowed to be developers".  Almost.
But if you also intend to exclude such people from even being able to
*run* your script, I can't take any of this seriously.

(OK, in reality, I am not taking any of this seriously.  This entire
proposal and discussion are like some bizarre fantasy land to me.  Bash
is a SHELL, for god's sake.  Not a serious programming language.  Even
serious programming languages are not ready for this; see the Python
proposal that was mentioned up-thread.)