Talk:Unicode variable names: Difference between revisions

==Why!==

:Yeah, that is not good at all. It means that the source code needs conversion to be usable on ascii based platforms. Maybe we will need a unidecoder for such sources. That is probably a future task. [[User:Markhobley|Markhobley]] 20:57, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

::The change was made to Perl 6 code, and it is my understanding that that's correct code for that language. Usage of Unicode glyphs in Perl 6 code is pretty normal. --[[User:Short Circuit|Michael Mol]] 21:58, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

::::What? I don't know about Egyption or Thai, but I do speak Chinese. There are historical (very rare) Chinese glyphs that don't have code points defined in Unicode, and there is the Unihan scheme that some people feel can be improved, but what is this "not sufficiently different from each other to prevent confusion" you are talking about? And even if it were true, whatever it means, how is that worse than not being able to write certain things at all? --[[User:Ledrug|Ledrug]] 00:13, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

:::: The triangle symbol was a good example, but it is not the only problematic symbol. There was a really excellent article on this, but I can't find at the moment. What can you not write, because the source code is limited to ASCII? BTW I am not saying don't use Unicode output on a graphical display, I am just saying that source code should be editable using a traditional ascii based editor, and the symbols should be limited to those that are available on an ascii based keyboard. [[User:Markhobley|Markhobley]] 23:03, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

::::“You just need to speak the language of the of compiler or interpreter.” Isn't it nice that a number of languages are happy to support non-ASCII in identifiers then? People can use (variations on) their own (human) language when communicating with the computer, and it will all be semantically sound too. Moreover, if the language supports them, it'd be a poor implementation of that language that didn't. ;–) –[[User:Dkf|Donal Fellows]] 21:45, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

 

== The wrong triangle ==

I first found \xa2\xa4 U+25b3, and put this one in my program. I know enough of the Greek alphabet to wonder why my Greek delta was not with other Greek letters in the table. So I checked the EUC-JP Kanji Code Table again, and found the uppercase Greek alphabet in a different part of the table. This is when I switched to \xa6\xa4 U+0394. But △ U+25b3 and Δ U+0394 look so alike, I still confuse them. --[[User:Kernigh|Kernigh]] 03:00, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

:That's really fascinating from a language design point of view. The problem of visual confusion is, of course, always going to occur when you try to cram too many codepoints into too few pixels. There are a few things to be said, though. First, choosing an appropriate font to the task can help. I wish the Unicode Consortium's fonts were a bit more available, since they often try to maintain at least some subtle distinctions between similar glyphs. This situation will likely improve somewhat over time. Second, this is a really good argument for domain-specific subsetting of codepoint repertoires. I'm not talking about reverting to ASCII, but rather contextual sanity checks. For instance, in Perl 6, identifiers cannot contain △, U+25B3 WHITE UP-POINTING TRIANGLE, because only alphanumerics (including ideographs) are allowed there. Third, since substituting △ for Δ is really in the category of a typo, it's also a good argument for explicit declaration of new identifiers, a spot that Ruby is arguably a bit weak on...at least from my perspective. <tt>:-)</tt> --[[User:TimToady|TimToady]] 19:05, 9 July 2011 (UTC)