[erlang-questions] Pmods, packages, Unicode source code and column numbers in compiler - what will happen in R16?

[Patrik Nyblom]

Hi!
On 10/17/2012 01:22 AM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
> On 17/10/2012, at 2:51 AM, Patrik Nyblom wrote:
>
>> Hi all!
>>
>> The OTP Technical board decisions from last Thursday are now published on the erlang.org website, which means that the answers to some questions about changes in R16 are finally officially answered.
> "UTF-8 BOM's will not be handled due to their limited use."
>
> 	As I understand it, byte order marks are not *supposed*
> 	to be used with UTF-8, because it has no byte order issues.
Well, it's not strictly forbidden. I suppose the use is to differentiate 
between different encodings, an UTF-8 BOM will tell you that it's UTF-8 
and not e.g. UTF-16. But as you say there's no byte order and I have 
personally never seen an editor actually writing them out, so instead of 
handling a more or less theoretical BOM presence, we simply don't.
>
> "Variable names will continue to be limited to Latin characters."
>
> 	I hope that means "for this release."
The concept of "capital as initial character" is not applicable to all 
character systems. The alternative would be "Big initial in those 
languages where such exists and then any character" or something. So we 
went for keeping the latin variables until someone comes up with a 
*good* suggestion for this.

So it means "for now", but hopefully not "for all eternity". Sorry for 
the disambiguity.
Suggestions for a good definition of a variable name in *any* script 
will be greatly appreciated!
>
> An end to Java envy (otherwise known as removal of 'packages'):
>
> 	Good news.  But let's keep thinking about ways to solve
> 	the problem that packages were meant to solve but didn't.
Yes, I totally agree.
>
> 	
>
>
Cheers,
/Patrik