> I'll go further and advance the modest proposal that a compiler that supports > UTF-8 > should treat non-ASCII characters as honorary alphabetic.
I would support a new ANSI standard (way overdue anyway) for PL/I that allowed any Unicode alphabetic character in identifiers, but I am leery about changing the rules for the existing language level. At a minimum, any compiler supporting extended identifiers should have an option for enforcing strict compliance with the current syntax. > 507 $ ls -alrt ? I understand about touch not getting a syntax error, but what is the ls supposedf to be telling? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Paul Gilmartin [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, June 26, 2020 9:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: New Mainframe Community 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
