[erlang-questions] Atom Unicode Support

[José Valim]

> Are you ready to edit chineese or thai?

I can already write atoms in Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Breton, Corsican,
Danish, English, Faroese, Galician, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian,
Kurdish, Leonese, Luxembourgish, Malay, Manx, Norwegian, Occitan,
Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish,
Walloon.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1

And I can only effectively speak 3 of those. There are already a lot of
programmers who can write in their own language and I don't expect to edit
their code.

Not only that, there are other programming languages which have already
adopted Unicode Support and the amount of times I had to read code in a
language I don't understand has been exactly 0.

I recommend reading Richard O'Keefe replies on the matter back in 2012:
http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2012-October/070187.html

> but a lot more thought would need to go into this than simply defining a
parsing rule or cobbling together a patch that builds cleanly.

I agree with this. That's why I want to focus on the underlying runtime
support and not on how it will affect parsing. Specially because according
to the OTP board post I mentioned above, they haven't made a decision if
Unicode in variables should be allowed. Today Unicode is already supported
in double quotes (and double quotes only) so I would say it is reasonable
to allow them in single quotes as well.

Should we move this discussion to another thread? I know this has been
extensively discussed in the past and it would be nice to keep this
discussion focused on the implementation details for whoever is following
the trail in the future.

*José Valim*
www.plataformatec.com.br
Skype: jv.ptec
Founder and Director of R&D
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