On 5/14/07, Jason Orendorff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 5/13/07, Greg Ewing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I don't think this scenario is all that unlikely. A > > program is initially written by a Russian programmer > > who uses his own version of "a" as a variable name. > > Later an English-speaking programmer makes some > > changes, and uses an ascii "a". Now there are two > > subtly different variables called "a" in different > > parts of the program. > > Greg, > > If this scenario were *not* unlikely, it would have happened > to a Java programmer somewhere, right? Has this *ever* > happened? I wasn't able to find a case.
Well, it's not exactly the kind of thing that makes for a riveting blog post. This is something the Perl 6 people debated for months on end when deciding whether to support Unicode identifiers. They eventually came to the conclusion that if your editor doesn't flag this kind of thing, it's a bug in the editor. I don't know of any editors that actually do this, but there you go. Of course, one of the main motivations for including Unicode support in Perl 6 was that they were running out of "meaningful" ASCII punctuation combinations and were looking to things like the »+« operator and the ¥ operator for their salvation. Thankfully Python doesn't have this problem. Collin Winter _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
