I'm afraid that's not very practical, because, you see, if I have a hypothetical compiler for some hypothetical programming-language, and I download some source-code from the internet and try to complile it, I expect one of two things, either (1) it will compile cleanly, or (2) I will have to UPGRADE my compiler (or version of Unicode), after which it will compile cleanly.
I don't expect, however, to have to DOWNgrade my version of Unicode. And I can't be expected to store EVERY numbered version of Unicode on my machine. I prefer the idea that the list of allowed identifier characters increases with each version of Unicode (or equivalently, that a list of excluded characters decreases with each version of Unicode). Sure - some mischevious types could write deliberately obfuscated code, but I think that's irrelevant to us. (They can do that NOW. There are even competitions for it). You only really need to consider ACCIDENTAL mistypes. --> Visual lookalikes are not NECESSARILY a problem, with a smart syntax engine. I think it would be pretty useful to have variable names like "my-function" (with a hyphen). A smart enough engine could transform the HYPHEN-MINUS into either HYPHEN or MINUS as appropriate. A text editor would probably render them in different colors anyway (one color for identifiers, another color for operators) so there wouldn't necessarily be any confusion. (Current C++ compilers do a similar thing today. A template class like "A<B<C> >" needs that space, otherwise the ">>" would be interpreted as "operator >>". Perhaps even more closely related, COBOL compilers allow hyphens in identifier names, AND as a minus sign. Again, you have to use spaces to distinguish the two uses). Jill -----Original Message----- From: Peter Kirk [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 3:14 PM To: Marco Cimarosti Cc: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: Re: Proposed Draft UTR #31 - Syntax Characters The way round this is to define syntax relative to a specific version of Unicode.
