That is wrong. If the possibility exists, it will be used (at least in
some cases by some people). In many cases this code will have to be
maintained by different people too. There will be guys which can't stand
this kind of identifiers but they are forced to use it. So this
"feature" renders to a limitation of freedom and productivity of
programmers.
I believe the possibility does always exist, since some language does allow it.
But not in very much demanded though.
The proposed idea has big drawbacks:
- code gets unreadable and unmaintainable (eye-ball search for mating
'"' chars, finding seperations between identifiers)
- the linker doesn't support special chars inside variable names so
automatic name manging would be necessary
- people are stimulated to use identifiers in their natural language
instead of short and pregnant keywords
- somebody could have the idea to demand Unicode characters inside
identifiers, cooperative software development (as widely exercised in
Open Source and Free Software development) across different countries
and languages comes to a stagnation due to lack of available
characters on the programmer's keyboards (or could you write German
äöüÄÖÜß, or even Russian cyrillic letters without painful tricks?)
- create heavy incompatibilities with Delphi, Turbo Pascal, ...
Very good reasonable points! I never think about these drawbacks before,
especially about the incompatibility issue. Compatibility is one point I like
from FPC so I still able to compile my codes in other pascal compilers. :) I
agree with you, my suggestion has lots more disadvantages than the advantages.
Thank you. :)
> - and finally, a personal argument: The professional programming
> language Pascal is shifted towards kiddies and wannabe programmers
> and I personally want to prevent that FreePascal resembles Visual
> Basic or other language for blowhards.
I don't agree with this. But I don't need to discuss more about this since it'd
be out of the topic. :)
-Bee-
has Bee.ography at
http://beeography.wordpress.com
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