bartc <b...@freeuk.com>: > On 24/11/2017 11:56, Stefan Ram wrote: >> Java allowed Unicode in identifiers right from the get-go >> (1995). I.e., one can write an assignment statement such as >> >> π = 3.141; > > That's great. But how do I type it on my keyboard? How do I view someone > else's code on my crappy ASCII text editor?
That's a different problem entirely. I remember the 1980's when terminals only supported 7-bit characters, but Finnish people needed to be able to type Finnish text. The solution was to ditch unneeded American punctuation characters. Thus, your first-ever C-program might have looked like this: main(argc, argv) int argc; char argvÄÅ; ä printf("Hello, world!Ön"); å > German isn't very challenging apart from a couple of umlauts and that > funny symbol for ss that looks like a Greek beta. And perhaps in > Germany, keyboards will already take care of those. > > But which keyboards will have π [copied from the one above!]? I can map any character onto any key. In fact, my keyboard mapping is heavily personalized. I must admit, though, that I haven't mapped π onto any key. It would be naïve to assume, though, that the problem doesn't apply to English. You never had to type a résumé—or use non-ASCII punctuation? If you should stray out of the USA, it wouldn't hurt to carry some € or £. I *have* mapped those keys onto my keyboard. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list