Sanity is subjective here. There are reasons to disallow non-ASCII characters, for example to prevent identical-looking characters from causing sneaky bugs in the code, like this but unintentional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack (and yes, don’t you worry, this absolutely can happen unintentionally).
OCaml’s old m17n compiler plugin solved this by requiring you pick one block per ‘word’ & you can only switch to another block if separated by an underscore. As such you can do print_แมว but you couldn’t do pℝint_c∀t. This is a totally reasonable solution.
Sorry, I forgot about this. I meant to say any sane modern language that allows unicode should use the block specifications (for e.g. to determine the alphabets, numeric, symbols, alphanumeric unicodes, etc) for similar rules with ASCII. So that they don’t have to individually support each language.
Oh, that I agree with. But then there’s the mess of Unicode updates, and if you’re using an old version of the compiler that was built with an old version of Unicode, it might not recognize every character you use…
Sanity is subjective here. There are reasons to disallow non-ASCII characters, for example to prevent identical-looking characters from causing sneaky bugs in the code, like this but unintentional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack (and yes, don’t you worry, this absolutely can happen unintentionally).
OCaml’s old m17n compiler plugin solved this by requiring you pick one block per ‘word’ & you can only switch to another block if separated by an underscore. As such you can do
print_แมวbut you couldn’t dopℝint_c∀t. This is a totally reasonable solution.Sorry, I forgot about this. I meant to say any sane modern language that allows unicode should use the block specifications (for e.g. to determine the alphabets, numeric, symbols, alphanumeric unicodes, etc) for similar rules with ASCII. So that they don’t have to individually support each language.
Oh, that I agree with. But then there’s the mess of Unicode updates, and if you’re using an old version of the compiler that was built with an old version of Unicode, it might not recognize every character you use…