Breaking backwards compatiblity

[Simen Kjærås]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:45:12 +0100, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx>  
wrote:

> 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.

I know Unicode covers a lot more than just Greek. I didn't know the usage
of Chinese was very common among physicists, though. :p


>> 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.) :-)

63,207[1] designated characters thus far[2]. Add in module names and other
'namespaces', and I'd say that should be no problem at all. As long as
your head doesn't explode, that is.

[1] http://unicode.org/alloc/CurrentAllocation.html

[2] Yeah, not all of those are valid identifiers.