From: Lea Gris Subject: Re: Feature request: opt-in support for non-ASCII shell identifiers Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 09:47:38 +0200
>> I would like to propose an opt-in Bash option to allow non-ASCII characters >> in >> shell identifiers. >> The idea is not to change Bash's default behavior. By default, variable >> names >> and other shell identifiers would remain restricted as they are today. The >> feature would only become active after an explicit user action, for example >> something like: >> shopt -s unicode_identifiers > Would you like to debug shell script with Cyrillic, Chinese, Korean > or maybe right-to left Arabic identifiers? (Interesting example, that I *was* able to run through Google translate - removed - because my mail client doesn't like "funny" characters. Incidentally, my SO knows some Russian, so it was kind of fun to show it to her.) Anyway, I suppose (if this feature were ever implemented, which I highly doubt), there would have to be a rule on the support boards (such as this one) that you abstain from using it if you want other people to have any chance of being able to debug scripts you post to the support boards. I18n of programming languages has always been an interesting idea - the idea that the code itself should look like it was written in some other language (keywords and all). Supposedly there have been some efforts in this direction, but it seems like a generally bad idea. Imagine if somebody (*) decides at some point that the C source code for bash itself has to be translated into Russian... (*) Probably the same people who have mandated the misuse of the word "they". ================================================================================= Please do not send me replies to my posts on the list. I always read the replies via the web archive, so CC'ing to me is unnecessary. When responding to my posts, please try to refrain from giving bureaucratic answers. If you have nothing useful to say, then just click Next and go on.
