On 2013-05-28 01:34:17 +0000, Walter Bright <newshou...@digitalmars.com> said:
On 5/27/2013 6:06 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
I don't find this a compelling reason to allow full Unicode on
identifiers, though. For one thing, somebody maintaining your code may
not know how to type said identifier correctly. It can be very
frustrating to have to keep copy-n-pasting identifiers just because they
contain foreign letters you can't type. Not to mention sheer
unreadability if the inventor's name is in Chinese, so the algorithm
name is also in Chinese, and the person maintaining the code can't read
Chinese. This will kill D code maintainability.
+1
-1
What's even worse for code maintainability is code that does not do
what it says.
Disallowing non-ASCII charsets does not prevent people from writing
foreign-language code. I've seen plenty of code in French in my life in
languages with no Unicode support. I've also seen plenty of bad English
in code. I'd rather see a correct French word as a variable or function
name than an incorrect English one. Correctly naming things is
difficult, and correctly naming them in a foreign language is even
more. This surely apply to languages using non-ASCII alphabets too.
Of course, if you're not using English words you'll be limiting
audience to programmers who understand that language. But you might
widen it in other directions. I worked once with a grad student who was
building a model to simulate breakages of water pipe systems. She was
good enough to write code that worked, although she needed my help for
a couple of things, notably increasing performance. The code was all in
French, and thankfully so as attempting to translate all those terms
(some dealing with concepts unknown to me) to English when writing the
code and back to French when explaining the concepts would have been
quite annoying, inefficient, and error-prone in our work.
While French likely will always be a possibility (as it fits well in
ASCII), I can see how writing code in Japanese or Russian might benefit
native speakers of those languages too, especially those for who
programming is only an incidental part of their job. Programming is a
form of expression, and it's always easier to express ourself in our
own native language.
--
Michel Fortin
michel.for...@michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/
