From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2007-09-27T08:11:14+09:00
Subject: Re: arbitrary Unicode characters in identifiers?

Hi,

In message "Re: arbitrary Unicode characters in identifiers?"
    on Thu, 27 Sep 2007 04:48:35 +0900, David Flanagan <david@davidflanagan.com> writes:

|Is this a good thing?  Is this expected to remain legal, or is the 
|parser likely to start enforcing rules about which characters are legal 
|in identifiers?

It is legal, but I don't recommend, for the following reasons:

  * it's difficult to read if users do not have proper font handling
    etc.
  * it's difficult to read if you don't read the character.  I don't
    think you choose Ruby if its reserved words are Japanese. ;-)
  * it's difficult to edit if users do not have any multibyte
    character aware editor.
  * it may cause confusion for mixed script encoding.  lambda in
    unicode differs from lambda in EUC-JP.

							matz.