Breaking backwards compatiblity

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 04:10:20AM +0100, Simen Kjærås wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 03:50:49 +0100, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
[...]
> >D is great for physics programming. Now you can have much, much more
> >than 26 variables :)
> 
> True, though mostly, you'd just change to using greek letters, right?

And Russian. And extended Latin. And Chinese (try exhausting that one!).
And a whole bunch of other stuff that you may not have known even
existed.


> Finally we can use θ for angles, alias ulong ℕ...

+1.

Come to think of it, I wonder if it's possible to write a large D
program using only 1-letter identifiers. After all, Unicode has enough
alphabetic characters that you could go for a long, long time before you
exhausted them all. (The CJK block will be especially resilient to
exhaustion.) :-)

Worse yet, if you don't have fonts installed for some of the Unicode
blocks, you'd just end up with functions and variables that have
invisible names (or they all look like a black splotch). So it'll be a
bunch of code that reads like black splotch = black splotch ( black
splotch ) + black splotch. Ah, the hilarity that will ensue...


T

-- 
It's bad luck to be superstitious. -- YHL