Raul wrote: > We can not treat all characters identically: True.
> Which characters should be treated as letters? Which should be treated as > digits? Which should be treated as tokens? Which should be treated as > whitespace? How will this effect code written with this version of J when > later versions of J become available? But it isn't as bad as all that. Unicode prescribes a lot of this, and where it doesn't, or it conflicts with a J design goal, we can make our own decisions. Perhaps we could take cues from other languages pursuing this path (UTF8 identifiers; e.g. Perl6). Of course, there's still this issue: > Right now ... the only universally viable subset of utf-8 is > ascii. I agree patience is warranted. But if we were really eager to get Unicode identifiers in the language soon, we could adopt some Punycode-like translation layer. Where Unicode is viable, it would be presented. Where it is not, Punycode(ish) would be. -Dan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
