On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:21:08 +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote:
>
>> Should they turn off their Hebrew or Chinese names too?
>
>Yes, for variables names in code samples where the language doesn't allow
>them.
>Consider these two lines in a PL/I program for a compiler that supports
>Unicode.
>The first is legitimate; the second is not.
>
>foo = bar /* פּלוני Good */;
>foo = פּלוני /* Bad! */;
>
I'll go further and advance the modest proposal that a compiler that supports
UTF-8
should treat non-ASCII characters as honorary alphabetic. So your "Bad!"
example
would be Good. Bash on MacOS and Linux goes partway there:
506 $ touch פּלוני
507 $ ls -alrt
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 7 paulgilm wheel 224 Jun 26 19:06 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 paulgilm wheel 0 Jun 26 19:06 פּלוני
drwxr-xr-x 3 paulgilm wheel 96 Jun 26 19:06 .
508 $
> ...
>> "Dumb" quotes are an artifact of typewriters and 6- or 7-bit character sets.
>
>There's nothing smart about using invalid syntax in code samples, and even
>where it's only a style issue there are millennials who don't agree with you.
>
OTOH, I laud modern (non-Bourne) shells for providing as an alternative
for symmetrical command substitution "` list `" the asymmetrical yet
ASCII "$( list )". The latter can be nested without a nightmare of escapes.
-- gil
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
