[fpc-devel] space char inside identifier's name

[Jonas Maebe]

On 25 Mar 2006, at 11:39, Johann Glaser wrote:

>  - people are stimulated to use identifiers in their natural language
>    instead of short and pregnant keywords
>  - somebody could have the idea to demand Unicode characters inside
>    identifiers, cooperative software development (as widely  
> exercised in
>    Open Source and Free Software development) across different  
> countries
>    and languages comes to a stagnation due to lack of available
>    characters on the programmer's keyboards (or could you write German
>    äöüÄÖÜß, or even Russian cyrillic letters without painful  
> tricks?)

I think it would be useful to allow this (although I don't see myself  
implementing support for it). Especially in educational contexts,  
where the users don't necessarily know English (yet), this provides  
much added value. Also in projects where not everyone speaks English  
but e.g. Spanish, French or even Chinese, this can be very useful.

Currently, they also name their variables and procedures in their  
native languages, just without accents etc (and that's possibly even  
less readable for a non-native speaker than in case the names would  
be syntactically correct -- e.g. in Polish you have the l and the ł,  
but in identifier names that all becomes l and you can guess which is  
the correct character if you don't know the word).

>  - create heavy incompatibilities with Delphi, Turbo Pascal, ...

FPC already supports plenty of things which are quite incompatible  
with Delphi and TP.

>  - and finally, a personal argument: The professional programming
>    language Pascal is shifted towards kiddies and wannabe programmers
>    and I personally want to prevent that FreePascal resembles Visual
>    Basic or other language for blowhards.

I don't see at all how identifier naming has anything to do with the  
"professionalism" of a language. You have wannabe programmers in  
pretty much every language out there (except maybe in languages like  
BrainF*ck and Whitespace), and when I started with Pascal I was a  
"kiddie" too (13-14 years).


Jonas