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

[Chet Ramey]

On 6/14/17 8:54 PM, PePa wrote:
> On 15/06/2560 07:13, Chet Ramey wrote:
>> A character that is classified as an alphanumeric in a particular locale,
>> but not in another, can lead to portability problems. That's what we're
>> debating here, not how something gets displayed in a text editor.
> 
> I don't think that exists in unicode or UTF-8 -- could you give an
> example of a character that is classified as an alphanumeric in a
> particular locale, but not in another?

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 think this whole discussion about alphanumerics in world languages is
> a red herring though. I don't see any objection in using any
> symbol/glyph as admissible in variable names, barring certain reserved
> ASCII ones, like space, comma, dot, dash, several kinds braces etc.
> It would also greatly simplify the whole implementation.

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.

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.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/