At 08:26 07/09/27, David Flanagan wrote:
>Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>> Hi,
>> In message "Re: arbitrary Unicode characters in identifiers?"
>>     on Thu, 27 Sep 2007 04:48:35 +0900, David Flanagan <david / davidflanagan.com> writes:
>> |Is this a good thing?  Is this expected to remain legal, or is the |parser likely to start enforcing rules about which characters are legal |in identifiers?
>> It is legal, but I don't recommend, for the following reasons:
>
>Thanks for the clarification.  I understand all the good reasons for not doing this, but I wanted to probe and make sure that there are no plans to do character type analysis.  I assume, for exmaple, that I can use digit characters from other non-ASCII alphabets as method and variable names and the parser is never going to tell me that it is illegal to start my identifiers with a digit...


I don't think there are any plans for character type analysis any time
soon, or even for the next few years, but I'd nevertheless be careful
with non-ASCII digits and similar stuff, because:
- Eventually, somebody might actually add a piece of checking code
  (the data is already there, in unicode.c).
- You may have difficulties when interfacing to other technologies
  (XML, for example, supports non-ASCII names, but not those starting
   with non-ASCII digits)
- In some editing environments, so-called 'national' digits are shown
  as ASCII digits (or vice versa), which will be very confusing.
- The only good application I can think of for non-ASCII digits at the
  start of an identifier is to prove the point. Maybe there are others,
  if you have one, please tell us.

Regards,    Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst / it.aoyama.ac.jp