Updating D beyond Unicode 2.0

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Fri Sep 21 20:25:54 UTC 2018


When I originally started with D, I thought non-ASCII identifiers with Unicode 
was a good idea. I've since slowly become less and less enthusiastic about it.

First off, D source text simply must (and does) fully support Unicode in 
comments, characters, and string literals. That's not an issue.

But identifiers? I haven't seen hardly any use of non-ascii identifiers in C, 
C++, or D. In fact, I've seen zero use of it outside of test cases. I don't see 
much point in expanding the support of it. If people use such identifiers, the 
result would most likely be annoyance rather than illumination when people who 
don't know that language have to work on the code.

Extending it further will also cause problems for all the tools that work with D 
object code, like debuggers, disassemblers, linkers, filesystems, etc.

Absent a much more compelling rationale for it, I'd say no.


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