[erlang-questions] EEP 40 - A proposal for Unicode variable and atom names in Erlang.

[Dmitry Belyaev]

Comments inside the quoted text below.

-- 
Dmitry Belyaev

On 02.11.2012, at 1:15, Richard O'Keefe wrote:

> 
> On 2/11/2012, at 1:36 AM, Dmitry Belyaev wrote:
> 
>> I've looked through the proposal and don't understand why there are no proposal to add localized keywords?
> 
> Because that's actually an orthogonal concern.
> ...
> There is no point in allowing people to plug Serbian keywords
> into a table if they will never be recognised as identifiers to
> start with.  We have to get that part right first.

It is like to allow to type only variable names localized and do not allow atoms. No use if I cannot write all the text in the language I've chosen.

What about your Māori students? Will you tell them they may write some parts of the program in their language and some other words they have to write in English?

> ...
> (3) Ada and Python have not done this.

I don't think that pointing to other bad choices is good.

> 
> Suppose we added a new directive:
> -keywords(kw_set_id).
> which looked in some path for a file containing
> [{'essayez','try'},{'attrapez','catch'},{'fin','end'},...].
> and used that to update a dictionary.
> The lexical analyser 
> Then the lexical analyser could report the English keywords
> to the parser.  We might want two lists: one for keywords
> and one for directives (other than -encoding and -keywords).
> 
> This is NOT an EEP; it is not a draft of an EEP; and I have
> no intention of producing an EEP on this topic at this time.
> Someone else can write that one.
> 
>> Suppose I will be using atoms and variables that are easy to read in my own language. Then I'll definitely be frustrated if I have to write keywords in any other language. More than that, it will be very annoying to anyone who has to switch keyboard layout from English to native.
> 
> One of the reasons that I have no intention of writing an EEP about this
> is that flicking between two keyboards is for me a single keystroke.
> (On the iPad: tap the globe.  On the desktop Mac: command space.)
> Switching keyboard layouts is about as hard as switching from lower to
> upper case and back.  It should also be possible to configure your
> text editor, perhaps using abbreviation support, to turn
> "@es" (or the equivalent in your language) into "try" and so on.
> 
> Until you've written your own wrappers around the library components
> you use, you'll need to flick back into Latin script to call those
> anyway.  Such wrappers _can_ be written, so the need to use some
> Latin script in everyday work may not continue forever, but it
> does mean there has to be a transition period in which people using
> non-Latin keyboards have to learn to use Cmd-Space.
> 

It's not only one shortcut to toggle the layout. It's another layout and the brain must be switched to that layout too just to type proper characters.
Another problem is bad layout design. The most widely used russian layout has cyrillic letter "С" on the same button as latin "C".
By the way, typing only this one letter I have made two errors while trying to type symbol " just because I forgot the layout was still russian.
What I want to say is that it is not only the problem of one additional keystroke.

Yes, I'd choose "All or Nothing" option for all this proposal.