[erlang-questions] A proposal for Unicode variable and atom names in Erlang.

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Nov 5, 2012, at 12:23 PM, Henning Diedrich <hd2010@REDACTED> wrote:

> 
> On Nov 5, 2012, at 6:49 AM, "Richard O'Keefe" <ok@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
>> To quote a Pogo strip, "you have the wrong mistake".
> 
> That was the very point. In the instance I can do without more choice.


I think many of these problems about confusion is largely a non-issue. Given languages which actually allows you to write full, unnormalized unicode, Google Go comes to mind, I see very few such actual problems in programs.

We already have these kinds of problems: Tabs vs spaces are not distinguishable. Neither are trailing white space. There are characters which are hard to recognize - and some fonts make it a priority to make them apart, like Richard said.

What I think is the key point is that I may be able to express certain things better with a larger symbol table. Yes, this also means I can obfuscate more, but I honestly only need the Erlang Pre-processor to win that battle of obfuscation.

Jesper Louis Andersen
  Erlang Solutions Ltd., Copenhagen