Re: RFE: Please allow unicode ID chars in identifiers

[L A Walsh]

Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 6/13/17 8:35 PM, L A Walsh wrote:
>   
> > Chet Ramey wrote:
> >     
> > > That's not relevant to the issue of whether or not a particular character
> > > is classified as alphabetic in one locale and not another.
> > >       
> > That isn't relevant either.  Unicode declares the categories
> > that characters are in -- GLOBALLY.  It doesn't vary by locale.
> >     
>
> But people don't work in Unicode. They work in their own locale.
> That locale may be consistent with Unicode, and it may not.  Adding
> something that doesn't respect a user's locale isn't useful.
>   
----
   It's locale agnostic.  On the Web (html5), on Windows, on Linux, all 
of them are using Unicode and they all work, are viewable and usable in
different locales.  The web WAS in the western locale w/html4 and 
before, but its using locale agnostic utf-8 in html5.  More and more 
locales are
switching to utf8 only.  I posted the numbers earlier in this
thread:
========================
If you look at the locales on a recent linux distro, (locale -a), out of
279 country codes, you'll see
9 that only have a local-encoding listed.
98 have no encoding listed (guessing they default to POSIX)
172 that have UTF-8
 and
139 that ONLY have UTF-8 listed.

Just from the numbers if you _don't_ support UTF-8 you support
131 locales (47%).  If you do support UTF-8, you can reach
270 locales (97%).

Seems that by supporting UTF-8, you have a good chance of being
understandable in over 95% of the locales in the locale database,
vs. less than 50% if you don't
===========================
So you say that "this year" we don't respect 3.3% of locals that
currently don't use unicode vs over 95% that do.  At some
point you figure out the costs to support 95% vs. the
extra costs to support those 3%, *this year*.  The ones
that haven't moved to unicode decrease ever year.
Making the claim that a solution won't work unless it covers
100% is riduculous given how large a percentage is
covered by the 63 chars in ASCII. 

And I don't know what you mean by people don't work in unicode.
If they work with the web, they do.  If they work on windows
or linux, they do.  Probably Macs as well --- most people
just may not be aware of it.

How many already work with English or ASCII?  Those are
already included in Unicode.