On Friday, 21 September 2018 at 20:25:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
When I originally started with D, I thought non-ASCII
identifiers with Unicode was a good idea. I've since slowly
become less and less enthusiastic about it.
First off, D source text simply must (and does) fully support
Unicode in comments, characters, and string literals. That's
not an issue.
But identifiers? I haven't seen hardly any use of non-ascii
identifiers in C, C++, or D. In fact, I've seen zero use of it
outside of test cases. I don't see much point in expanding the
support of it. If people use such identifiers, the result would
most likely be annoyance rather than illumination when people
who don't know that language have to work on the code.
Not seeing identifiers in languages you don't program in or can
read in is expected.
If it's supported it will be used:
Japanese Swift:
https://speakerdeck.com/codelynx/programming-swift-in-japanese
Extending it further will also cause problems for all the tools
that work with D object code, like debuggers, disassemblers,
linkers, filesystems, etc.
Absent a much more compelling rationale for it, I'd say no.
More compelling than: "there're 6 billion people in this world
who don't speak english?"
Allowing people to program in their own language while reducing
the cognitive friction for people who want to learn programming
in the majority of the world seems like a no-brainer thing to do.