On Jun 5, 2014, at 12:41 PM, Hans Aberg <haber...@telia.com> wrote: > On 5 Jun 2014, at 17:46, Jeff Senn <s...@maya.com> wrote: > >> That is: are identifiers merely sequences of characters or intended to be >> comparable as “Unicode strings” (under some sort of compatibility rule)? > > In computer languages, identifiers are normally compared only for equality, > as it reduces lookup time complexity.
Well in this case we are talking about parsing a source file and generating internal symbols, so the complexity of the comparison operation is a red herring. The real question is how does the source identifier get mapped into a (compiled) symbol. (e.g. in C++ this is not an obvious operation) If your implication is that there should be no canonicalization (the string from the source is used as a sequence of characters only directly mapped to a symbol), then I predict sticky problems in the future. The most obvious of which is that in some cases I will be able to change the semantics of the complied program by (accidentally) canonicalizing the source text (an operation, I will point out, that is invisible to the user in many (most?) Unicode aware editors). _______________________________________________ Unicode mailing list Unicode@unicode.org http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
