Updating D beyond Unicode 2.0

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 9/21/18 9:08 PM, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
> On Friday, 21 September 2018 at 20:25:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> ....you *do* know that not every codebase has people working on it who 
> only know English, right?
> 
> If I took a software development job in China, I'd need to learn 
> Chinese. I'd expect the codebase to be in Chinese. Because a Chinese 
> company generally operates in Chinese, and they're likely to have a lot 
> of employees who only speak Chinese.
> 
> And no, you can't just transcribe Chinese into ASCII.
> 
> Same for Spanish, Norwegian, German, Polish, Russian -- heck, it's 
> almost easier to list out the languages you *don't* need non-ASCII 
> characters for.
> 
> Anyway, here's some more D code using non-ASCII identifiers, in case you 
> need examples: https://git.ikeran.org/dhasenan/muzikilo

But aren't we arguing about the wrong thing here? D already accepts 
non-ASCII identifiers. What languages need an upgrade to unicode symbol 
names? In other words, what symbols aren't possible with the current 
support?

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

-Steve