Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Manu]

On 28 May 2013 11:42, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday, May 28, 2013 11:38:08 Peter Williams wrote:
> > On 28/05/13 09:44, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > > Since language keywords are already in English, we might as well
> > > standardize on English identifiers too.
> >
> > So you're going to spell check them all to make sure that they're
> > English?  Or did you mean ASCII?
>
> I think that it was more an issue of that the only reason that Unicode
> would
> be necessary in identifiers would be if you weren't using English, so if
> you
> assume that everyone is going to be using some form of English for their
> identifier names, you can skip having Unicode in identifiers. So, a natural
> effect of standardizing on English is that you can stick with ASCII.
>

I'm fairly sure that any programmer who takes themself seriously will use
English, I don't see any reason why this rule should nee to be be
implemented by the compiler.
The loss I can imagine is that kids, or people from developing countries,
etc, may have an additional barrier to learning to code if they don't speak
English.
Nobody in this set is likely to produce a useful library that will be used
widely.
Likewise, no sane programmer is going to choose to use a library that's not
written in English.

You may argue that the keywords and libs are in English. I can attest from
personal experience, that a child, or a non-english-speaking beginner
probably has absolutely NO IDEA what the keywords mean anyway, even if they
do speak English.
I certainly had no idea when I was a kid, I just typed them because I
figured out what they did. I didn't even know how to say many of them, and
realised 5 years later than I was saying all the words wrong...

So my point is, why make this restriction as a static compiler rule, when
it's not practically going to be broken anyway. You never know, it may
actually assist some people somewhere.
I think it's a great thing that D can accept identifiers in non-english.
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