Re: [Help-smalltalk] Non-ASCII variables

[Garreau\, Alexandre]

On 2018-10-16 at 17:20, SJS wrote:
> begin  quoting Garreau, Alexandre as of Tue, Oct 16, 2018 at 04:09:46PM +0200:
>> On 2018-10-16 at 15:27, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
>> > So I don???t know if their proprietary software supports it (maybe even
>> > not),
>> 
>> So I just asked someone to check and it does, so wouldn???t it be nice to
>> have it in GNU Smalltalk too? would it be difficult?
>
> Don't forget the problem of homoglyphs.

I know, there even was a discussion about this recently on emacs-devel.
This is an interesting issue, that arise way more relevantly about
domain names, usernames, web searches, or spam, etc. than for source
code, as if you use free software from trusted sources, this is just as
likely to happen than willingly-too-complex obfuscated programs, or
bad-names obfuscated programs, etc.

This two aren’t a reason from banning other languages from texts such as
domain names, nicks, etc., nor for, for instance, putting restrictions
in a language about the complexity of anything such as function length.

And moreover that’s not a reason for banning other languages from
identifiers, as C11, all lisps, and one SmallTalk showed.

Unicode, or intermixing several languages, is in itself a modern issue,
as more and more languages begin mixing writing systems, it becomes
mandatory, yet indeed it is badly done, and centralized, and such, but
it is standard and existing.

> And don't forget about emojis.

They indeed pushed it pretty far, but hey, that’s their fault… And if
you implement unicode, you get functions to know what category of
character a character is, so you may as well exhaustively ban emojis, or
only allow letters, or letters and digits, or and so on.

I don’t know what’s the norm for SmallTalk, but C11 for instance, afair,
allow *at least* any letter or digit from any alphabet.  So that should
include arabic as well as maya digits, as well as arabic, chinese,
hangul, cyrillic, etc.