Improving Compiler Error Messages

[Walter Bright]

Pelle wrote:
> On 05/03/2010 02:53 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> What is under your right pinky? On my keyboard it is semicolon, or colon
>> if you use the shift key
>>
> 
> On your typical swedish keyboard, it's ö. { is on right_alt+7 or 
> something like that.
> 
> I recommend, however, to always use the american keyboard layout for 
> coding, since it works, well, way better.

Back 20 years ago, there was a lot of talk about how clumsy it was to program C 
on nonstandard keyboards. Hence the development of C's digraphs and alternate 
keywords.

However, experience shows that nobody uses them. At ACCU, I talked to many 
foreigners about how they dealt with language issues. They all said they CODE IN 
ENGLISH, with english identifier names, comments, etc. The office technical 
talk, though, was in their native tongue.

The upshot of that is:

1. ASCII has won, at least for source code.

2. There's no realistic reason to support anything other than ASCII for source 
code other than string literals and comments, in particular, no reason to 
support the unicode alpha characters in identifiers.

3. There's no realistic reason to avoid using ASCII characters like {.