2014-06-04 20:15, Andre Schappo wrote:
Well because outside of groups like this there is still little awareness of Unicode, little understanding of Unicode, little willingness to use Unicode and little conscious usage of Unicode
That’s very true. In the specific case of “using Unicode” (which so often means just “using characters outside the Ascii repertoire”) in programmin language identifiers, there are other reasons affecting, too. As alluded to here:
On 4 Jun 2014, at 16:53, Shawn Steele wrote:
[...]
I rarely see non-Latin code in practice though, but of course I’m a native English speaker.
The point is that English is largely the de facto standard human language in programming—in documentation, comments, and hence also in forming identifiers, even though the data processed might be in different languages. There are good practical reasons for using English: programmers can be expected to understand it, and it is generally the only language you can expect them to understand.
People also learn by example, and they often learn to stick to Ascii without even thinking why. Where I live, they learn to replace “ä” and “å” by “a” and “ö” by “o” rather automatically when they use words of national languages as identifiers. If you ask them, they probably say that the Scandinavian letters cannot be used reliably, which is often so true, even though it might not apply to the use in some programming languages.
Personally, I often favor identifiers in the national language for clarity: this distinguishes user-defined identifiers from reserved words and from identifiers defined in libraries. But this is useful mostly in tutorial material, not that much in routine programming.
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