[erlang-questions] Atom Unicode Support

ok@REDACTED ok@REDACTED
Tue Feb 2 09:33:22 CET 2016


I should point out that Unicode isn't just useful for Chinese,
Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Thai. Hindi, Ancient Egyptian, &
so on.  There are plenty of languages basically using the
Latin script, but with some extra letters or tweaks.  Take
as an example one of the official languages of my country,
which uses lower- and upper-case vowels with macrons.  If one
is allowed to write english_name and óvenjulegt_nafn (Icelandic)
it is a little difficult to explain why ingoa_māori (Māori)
should be forbidden.

Now Māori is definitely a minority language, but then so are
Faroese, Gàidhlig, Leonese, and Manx, supported by Latin 1.

As a specific technical issue, Erlang allows unquoted atoms
like roller_ball@REDACTED  The internet has had
internationalised domain names since 1998 (that would be about
17 years) and yes, they're mapped through Punycode, but if
you have a domain name like
pūtaiao-rorohiko.otāgo.wānanga.nz
(which, to be fair, I *don't*, but it's surely only a matter of
time) won't you want to be able to use it as or in an atom?

By the way this means that domain names are one of the areas
in Erlang/OTP that need review before Unicode atoms can be
adopted.








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