Re: Unicode in source code. WHY?

From: Torsten Mohrin (mohrin@sharmahd.com)
Date: Tue Jul 20 1999 - 14:35:08 EDT


On Tue, 20 Jul 1999 08:28:17 -0700 (PDT), Michael Everson wrote:

>All text should be written in the Universal Character Set in preference to
>ANY OTHER character set. Please the gods and the stockholders, this will be
>available to all of us soon.

Okay, we should use UCS. ASCII is very US centered, but it's a nice
little subset for special things, like programming languages and stuff
like that.

>>UCNs are a good idea, e.g. in string literals, regular expression,
>>resource files, config files and so on. But, IMHO, it's a very stupid
>>idea to use Unicode characters in identifiers. I will never use them
>>and I will forbid the programmers in my company to use them
>>(fortunately I can do that).
>
>With that kind of attitude, I imagine you will find your company
>uncompetitive in the global market.

None of our customers are interested in the character set and language
of our source code, but rather in the capabilities of the software.
Just using Japanese variable names doesn't make my software "global".
To use only one language (and character set) in source code is a
matter of source code maintenance. My English is not the best, but the
quality of source code improved a lot after switching from German to
English.

Apart from that, a lot of development tools doesn't allow me to use
Unicode. I'm more worried about the attitude of some really big
companies which sell those tools for a lot of money.

>>We use only English based identifiers.
>
>As an educated native speaker of English I would like to inform you that
>even English, correctly spelled, requires characters other than the letters
>A-Z, as in naturalized words such as façade, café, vicuña, and so on.

Yes, I heard of it :) I should say "We use English based identifiers
and kick away those accents" ;-)

To clarify: it was not my intention to praise ASCII and bash Unicode.
Otherwise I would subscribe to ascii@ascii.org :) I simply doubt that
we have to use all available characters in every context, only for the
reason that we have codes for all those characters. What comes next:
translating all C++ keywords?

--
Torsten Mohrin
Sharmahd Computing GmbH, Hannover, Germany
Phone: +49-511-13780, Fax: +49-511-13450
http://www.sharmahd.com, mohrin@sharmahd.com



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