Re: Unicode in source code. WHY?

From: Sandra O'donnell USG (odonnell@zk3.dec.com)
Date: Wed Jul 21 1999 - 09:36:02 EDT


   Tex Texin wrote:
   For projects outside of English-speaking territories, it increases
   the difficulty and/or the cost of getting a good programmer, if I
   also require them to read/write English. . .
   I would rather concentrate my recruiting efforts on technical skills
   and (where appropriate!) let variable names be native, then overlook
   an otherwise qualified engineer.

Yes, of course. This is a good point.
   
   Frankly, anyone looking at the code learns the native (variable)
   names quickly. Programming is not for those that can't pickup an
   acronym or widget name quickly...

I'm sure engineers pick up some of the info quickly. But the reason
we use (or want to use) meaningful names and comments is because they
help us understand the code. If they were not useful, we might as well
program in assembler, and all variable names could just be numbers.

Comments and variable names can be misleading, but they often
provide useful information. Source code is meant to, at some level,
be read and interpreted by humans. That's why people in other
countries want the ability to use native characters, and that's
why many companies try to enforce some level of readability in
their source code. That's also why I am dismayed when I see
proposals to use the Unicode code values instead of actual
characters within various entities -- in Java code, in locale
definition files, etc., etc. I understand the reasons *for* using
those code values, but I believe people forget how much we give
up in terms of source code readability when we use them.

As with everything in programming, this is a tradeoff. Do you
restrict yourself to a small group of characters, knowing you're
preventing some engineers from using names and strings that are
meaningful to them, or do you allow a richer repertoire, knowing
this makes source code more readable to some subsets of engineers,
but probably more difficult to other engineers that might have to
maintain it?

                -- Sandra
-----------------------
Sandra Martin O'Donnell
Compaq Computer Corporation
sandra.odonnell@compaq.com
odonnell@zk3.dec.com



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