Re: Accented characters in identifiers
In the past I try to read some code from Aku but because the identifiers were in
a language I don't understand, It was hard to understand and finaly I didn't
persue.
As a french speaking programmer, I always used english identifiers for code I
distribute on web, because I consider english as a commun language for
programmers all around the world.
But when I write code for myself I use french identifier et comments, but I
don't really miss accent in identifiers.
regards,
Jacques Deschênes
Juergen Luethje wrote:
>
> Robert Craig wrote:
>
> > Juergen Luethje wrote:
> > > Robert Craig wrote:
> > > > CChris wrote:
> > > >> Currently, Eu interprets characters with the most significant bit set
> > > >> as
> > > >> opcodes. Only old shrouded files store Eu opcodes this way.
> > > >>
> > > >> Isn't it time to remove that restriction, so as to be able to use non
> > > >> english identifiers in programs? Other languages frequently use
> > > >> accented
> > > >> characters.
> > > >
> > > > Yes, I agree. I'll do that fairly soon, if nobody objects.
> > > > Others, such as Igor Kachan, have also mentioned the lack of support
> > > > for the higher ASCII codes for non-English languages.
> > >
> > > <snip>
> > >
> > > Sorry, I don't think that this is a good idea, because:
> > >
> > > a) The usage of this feature will bring a considerable disadvantage.
> > > When someone creates identifiers that contain special characters of
> > > her/his language, it is likely that other people somewhwre else in
> > > the world will have problems to read that code.
> > > You recently reminded us of a post from you on 12 Feb 2002:
> > > <<a
> > > href="http://www.listfilter.com/cgi-bin/esearch.exu?fromMonth=2&fromYear=7&toMonth=2&toYear=7&postedBy=rds&keywords=declaration+initialize">http://www.listfilter.com/cgi-bin/esearch.exu?fromMonth=2&fromYear=7&toMonth=2&toYear=7&postedBy=rds&keywords=declaration+initialize</a>>
> > >
> > > In this message it reads:
> > > | I like it better the way it is. You could argue that I don't have to
> > > | use variable inits if I don't want to. You could argue that I don't
> > > | have to use goto if I don't want to. A language does not exist just
> > > | to serve the isolated programmer. It exists to serve a community
> > > | of programmers. In situations where it really doesn't matter
> > > | how something is written, I think there are advantages to
> > > | reducing the number of choices.
> > >
> > > IMHO the same is true concerning special characters in identifiers,
> > > especially since many of them are not equal in different languages.
> > > The Euphoria community is small enough, Euphoria shouldn't encourage
> > > people to write code that can only be read by a fraction of this
> > > small community.
> > >
> > > b) It is not necessary at all. We currently have a sufficient number of
> > > characters for creating identifiers. The German language also has
> > > some special characters, but I _never_ had the need to use one of
> > > them in an identifier.
> >
> > OK, thanks for that insight.
> > I guess I'll hold off, for at least several days,
> > until we hear from some other non-English programmers.
> >
> > It just seemed to me that if I had to do without
> > some of the English alphabet in my identifiers,
> > it would be annoying to me, so I figured it must be
> > annoying to non-English programmers.
>
> Well, I must admit that German with its 7 special characters (and I
> think e.g. French, Spanish or Swedish don't contain much more non-ASCII
> characters) is much closer to English than e.g. Russian or Japanese. So
> I understand especially Igor's intention here.
>
> > Also, if someone
> > creates identifiers that are not English-related,
> > I wouldn't understand them anyway, regardless of
> > whether they contain accents or funny-looking characters.
>
> 
I agree.
>
> I wanted to say that allowing special characters in identifiers
> _encourages_ programmers to write code that is hard to read for a lot of
> other people. So I think it increases the chance that an Eu programmer
> will see identifiers that (s)he wouldn't understand.
>
> > I guess it could be a problem though if some characters
> > resemble punctuation and other confusing shapes,
> > like some of the English ASCII 128-255 characters do on my
> > English region computer.
>
> I also think so. When you see non-English identifiers e.g. 'Pferd' and
> 'Ente', even when you do not know their meaning (which is btw. 'horse'
> and 'duck') you probably can easily recognize and distinguish them from
> each other in the whole code anyway. This might not be so easy with
> identifiers that consist of "very special" (from the point of view of
> the reader) characters.
>
> When I would try to read important code that contained identifiers which
> are meaningless to me, and which I could hardly recognize and distinguish
> from each other, then I think I would try to guess appropriate German or
> English names for them, and then "search and replace" these identifiers.
>
> This leads to another point, which I almost had forgotten:
> Special characters can confuse editors. In the past I repeatedly made the
> experience that editors handle some special characters as word delmiters.
>
> I just tested the following with the current Metapad version 3.51:
> When I double-cklick anywhere at the expression 'FooBar', Metapad always
> selects the whole expression, i.e. the entire "word". This does _not_
> happen with the expression 'FoüBar'. (I hope it will read here on the
> message board as expected -- I replaced the third character with the
> lowercase German u-Umlaut.) Metapad handles this special German character
> as a word delimiter, so it "sees" the two words 'Fo' and 'Bar'!
>
> When I "search and replace" identifiers in program source code, I use
> the option:
> [v] whole words only
>
> With an editor that behaves as described above, I think this can lead to
> unexpected and unwanted results.
>
> Regards,
> Juergen
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