languages with full unicode support

[David Hopwood]

Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Chris Uppal schrieb:
>> Joachim Durchholz wrote:
>>
>>>> This is implementation-defined in C.  A compiler is allowed to accept
>>>> variable names with alphabetic Unicode characters outside of ASCII.
>>>
>>> Hmm... that could would be nonportable, so C support for Unicode is
>>> half-baked at best.
>>
>> Since the interpretation of characters which are yet to be added to
>> Unicode is undefined (will they be digits, "letters", operators, symbol,
>> punctuation.... ?), there doesn't seem to be any sane way that a
>> language could allow an unrestricted choice of Unicode in identifiers.
> 
> I don't think this is a problem in practice. E.g. if a language uses the
> usual definition for identifiers (first letter, then letters/digits),
> you end up with a language that changes its definition on the whims of
> the Unicode consortium, but that's less of a problem than one might
> think at first.

It is not a problem at all. See the stability policies in
<http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr31/tr31-2.html>.

> Actually I'm not sure that Unicode is important for long-lived code.
> Code tends to not survive very long unless it's written in English, in
> which case anything outside of strings is in 7-bit ASCII. So the
> majority of code won't ever be affected by Unicode problems - Unicode is
> more a way of lowering entry barriers.

Unicode in identifiers has certainly been less important than some thought
it would be -- and not at all important for open source projects, for example,
which essentially have to use English to get the widest possible participation.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood at blueyonder.co.uk>