4 ms·
What's the purpose of supporting other character sets in a language's syntax? Good luck finding contributors from all over the world for a software written in T
by afr0ck 5y ago
What's the purpose of supporting other character sets in a language's syntax? Good luck finding contributors from all over the world for a software written in Turkish characters. I mean for hobbyists or very special purpose cases where such a thing is really needed (writing code in Turkish or Chinese or Arabic or whatever), people can add language support for that (after all it's just a bunch of keywords). It needs some effort but not impossible. People can also design programming languages with their own special character sets. It's wild to see someone objecting writing software in ASCII because of diversity/cultural issues. Really wild!
- hnfong 5y agoNot sure about Turkish, but I know for a fact that when you have a team of Chinese devs work on a Chinese software project Mandarin starts to show up in the codebase. And while usually it's written in pinyin (the standard Chinese romanization system) since most programming languages assume ASCII, it's obvious that those people could benefit from being able to use Chinese characters in place of ASCII and English. If your argument is "sure, then let them invent/fork $LANGUAGE to suit their needs", just take note that if you're a language designer/developer that wants to see the language widely adopted, it's detrimental to have the attitude that ASCII is enough for everybody. There's no reason to have (for example) "Arabic-python" just because somebody insists on ASCII instead of UTF-8 even though there's little technical reason not to support it.
- layer8 5y agoNon-ASCII characters make sense in national application domains, e.g. tax software, where you don’t want be forced to transliterate (or worse: try to translate) the non-English terminology.