Well, this is an English or European centric attitude. For a Israeli, it is
much safer to use Hebrew identifiers. Traditional programming languages
encourage amateur transcription of Hebrew, which is error prone, difficult
to read, and you never know for sure when, for example, the programmer will
use c or k or q or whether he used all three for the same variable. How
about KodTakala, QodTaqala, CodTakala etc.
Jony
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Markus Kuhn [mailto:Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 1999 10:59 AM
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: Re: Unicode in Source Code (Ada95 and Java)
>
>
> Murray Sargent wrote on 1999-07-20 01:16 UTC:
> > An example where nonASCII identifiers is really useful is in coding up
> > mathematical formulae that contain Greek letters. For example,
> a program is
> > much more readable if you use U+3B1 for alpha rather than
> spelling out the
> > name alpha. Similarly U+3C0 for pi. Hopefully C++ will follow Java's
> > excellent example and allow Unicode alphabetics in variable names.
>
> Ada95 is even younger than Java and it is the first ISO standardized
> programming language that was designed after the publication of ISO
> 10646-1. Of course, Ada95 - like Java - also uses UCS as its internal
> character set. However, the Ada95 revision team has explicitly decided
> not to follow the path of Java and they only allowed the Latin-1 letters
> in identifiers. The Ada community is very concerned about safety issues
> and about the readability of source code, because Ada is widely deployed
> today in safety critical environments (most avionics software is written
> in Ada for instance). Unicode contains a quite large number of
> characters that are difficult - if not impossible - to distinguish
> visually. A safety requirement for Ada identifiers is that it must be
> easy for human readers to decide whether two identifiers are different
> or equal. The presence of Unicode characters such as U+00D0, U+0110 and
> U+0189 introduces a lot of potential hazards that are best avoided by
> not allowing a too rich repertoires of characters in object identifiers.
> Note however that the Ada95 standard does allow implementations to offer
> "non-standard" optional modes that do allow additional UCS characters in
> identifiers.
>
> Have a look at:
>
> Ada95 Reference Manual, ISO/IEC 8652:1995(E), Section 2.1:
> Character Set,
> http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/languages/ada/userdocs/docadalt/rm95/02.htm
>
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ada.html
>
> Markus
> (who decided to use Ada95 for his PhD implementation project, because
> the language is at least as nice and modern as Java, but its compilers
> produce far more efficient native machine code.)
>
> --
> Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
> Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
>
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