Peter Kirk wrote: > Well, the situation with Hebrew sof pasuq is almost identical to that > for Greek and Arabic question marks, except that it is functionally a > full stop not a question mark, so I can't see any reason other than > prejudice for omitting it from the list.
Well, I had a much better reason than prejudice: ignorance. :-) That's why I told that my two lists were tentative and asked for comments. > [...] - maqaf is very much the cultural equivalent of hyphen, and I > have seen recent discussion about whether the hyphen key on a > Hebrew keyboard ought actually to generate a maqaf. [...] > I'm not talking about biblical Hebrew here, I'm talking about > a living modern language. [...] And these are exactly the kinds of reasons that I was looking for: any punctuation used in modern text and/or available on keyboards are what good candidates for inclusion in Pattern_Syntax (i.e., exclusion from usage in identifiers). > [...] extend the list to include all punctuation and to allow as > yet undefined characters to be added to it. Well, the requirement for an invariable set seems to be part of the "rules of the game" with this UTR, so I'll stick to it. I guess that this requirement is due to backward compatibility issues. If version X of a certain programming language accepts identifier "foo:bar" (where ":" is a certain mark), it is not acceptable that version X+1 of the same language treats the same sequence as a syntax error: that would make existing source code in that language potentially unusable. Obviously, it must be possible to customize the default sets: most *existing* computer languages already allow in identifiers characters that would be excluded by UTR#31 (e.g.: <_> <-> <$> <'>). _ Marco
