No, the brief answer is that Jsoftware does not believe that unicode identifiers are a good addition to the language. While it's certainly possible for such identifiers to become confusing if exotic characters are used, they are supported in Unbox (https://github.com/iocane/unbox, a fork of J which is no longer maintained) and I have used them effectively for typing up LaTeX documents using standard symbols for mathematical constants and functions.
Unicode identifiers, if added, would join the long list of features that can be misused to create confusing code. But there are many sensible uses for them, and it's easy enough for organizations which don't want to use unicode to disallow it in their source files. Marshall On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 07:21:02PM -0400, Raul Miller wrote: > On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 6:55 PM, Jimmy Gauvin <jimmy.gau...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 2) @ "Those who know J innards" : how hard would it be to add unicode as > > valid characters for identifiers? > > You can find discussions on the subject using forum search (from > jsoftware.com forums), but the brief answer is that there's no good > way to do this. > > Just reading the full unicode specs is beyond the abilities of most > people, but ... for example: there's good reasons why most people do > not know how to type most unicode characters. > > Thanks, > > -- > Raul > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
