On 25 Mar 2006, at 11:39, Johann Glaser wrote:
- people are stimulated to use identifiers in their natural language
instead of short and pregnant keywords
- somebody could have the idea to demand Unicode characters inside
identifiers, cooperative software development (as widely
exercised in
Open Source and Free Software development) across different
countries
and languages comes to a stagnation due to lack of available
characters on the programmer's keyboards (or could you write German
äöüÄÖÜß, or even Russian cyrillic letters without painful
tricks?)
I think it would be useful to allow this (although I don't see myself
implementing support for it). Especially in educational contexts,
where the users don't necessarily know English (yet), this provides
much added value. Also in projects where not everyone speaks English
but e.g. Spanish, French or even Chinese, this can be very useful.
Currently, they also name their variables and procedures in their
native languages, just without accents etc (and that's possibly even
less readable for a non-native speaker than in case the names would
be syntactically correct -- e.g. in Polish you have the l and the ł,
but in identifier names that all becomes l and you can guess which is
the correct character if you don't know the word).
- create heavy incompatibilities with Delphi, Turbo Pascal, ...
FPC already supports plenty of things which are quite incompatible
with Delphi and TP.
- and finally, a personal argument: The professional programming
language Pascal is shifted towards kiddies and wannabe programmers
and I personally want to prevent that FreePascal resembles Visual
Basic or other language for blowhards.
I don't see at all how identifier naming has anything to do with the
"professionalism" of a language. You have wannabe programmers in
pretty much every language out there (except maybe in languages like
BrainF*ck and Whitespace), and when I started with Pascal I was a
"kiddie" too (13-14 years).
Jonas_______________________________________________
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