Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 01:28:22AM +0200, Hans W. Uhlig wrote:
> On Monday, 27 May 2013 at 23:05:46 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> >On 5/27/2013 3:18 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >>Well, D *does* support non-English identifiers, y'know... for
> >>example:
> >>
> >>	void main(string[] args) {
> >>		int число = 1;
> >>		foreach (и; 0..100)
> >>			число += и;
> >>		writeln(число);
> >>	}
> >>
> >>Of course, whether that's a good practice is a different story.
> >>:)
> >
> >I've recently come to the opinion that that's a bad idea, and D
> >should not support it.

Currently, the above code snippet compiles (upon inserting "import
std.stdio;", that is). Should that be made illegal?


> Why do you think its a bad idea? It makes it such that code can be
> in various languages? Just lack of keyboard support?

I can't speak for Walter, but one issue that comes to mind is when
someone reads the code and doesn't understand the language the
identifiers are in, or worse, can't reliably recognize the distinctions
between the glyphs, and so can't match identifier names correctly -- if
you don't know Japanese, for example, seeing a bunch of Japanese
identifiers of equal length will look more-or-less the same (all
gibberish to you), so it only obscures the code. Or if your computer
doesn't have the requisite fonts to display the alphabet in question,
then you'll just see a bunch of ?'s or black blotches for all program
identifiers, making the code completely unreadable.

Since language keywords are already in English, we might as well
standardize on English identifiers too. (After all, Phobos identifiers
are English as well.) While it's cool to have multilingual identifiers,
I'm not sure if it actually adds any practical value. :) If anything, it
arguably detracts from usability. Multilingual program output, of
course, is a different kettle o' fish.


T

-- 
Doubt is a self-fulfilling prophecy.