Mark Davis wrote: > Apostrophe, hyphen, and various other puncutation by default continue > a word, but this behavior may be overriden on a per-language basis.
This may work for things such as finding word boundaries, but not for identifiers. According to the ID_Start and ID_Continue properties in <http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/DerivedCoreProperties.txt>, neither U+0027 (APOSTROPHE) nor U+2019 (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK) are allowed in an identifier. And this is not surprising, since they are primarily quotation marks. On the other hand, U+02BC (MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE) is allowed in any position within an identifier. Using U+02BC as the apostrophe, would allow to use words such as: <students'>, <isn't> or <'em> in identifiers. But this hits against the fact that Unicode's own suggestion is to use U+2019 for the apostrophe. BTW, in my language the apostrophe is not used only for optional contractions: it is mandatory in some aspects of orthography, e.g. for the imperatives of some verbs. For instance, the Italian for <go> (imperative) is <va'> -- and I don't need to explain why programmers prefer imperatives for naming procedures... _ Marco
