Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question

[Rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, April 1, 2015 at 7:57:07 AM UTC+5:30, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Richard Wordingham writes:
> 
> > One of the issues with using the full set of Unicode
> > characters is that many are easily misread when
> > there are no constraints. Many Greek capitals look
> > just like Roman capitals, and Latin 'o', Greek 'ο'
> > and Cyrillic 'о' may be indistinguishable. This is
> > not a good idea for writing code.
> 
> Good point. In addition, there are many Unicode chars
> that aren't human language chars but instead are to be
> used in geometric figures, in math and otherwise
> scientific/engineering notation, and so on - and those
> also collide (or almost so) with for example the
> Latin 'o' and probably other letters as well.

Of course — Richard does use the phrase "FULL set of Unicode characters"

Currently we see programming languages ALREADY SUPPORTING large swathes of the
1 million chars for identifier-chars -- mostly the 'Letter' and perhaps
the 'number/digit' categories.

So there are two somewhat opposite points:
1. Supporting the Babel of human languages in programming identifiers is
probably a mistake.  In any case if a language must go that way, the choice of
html seems more sane: active opt-in with (something like) a charset declaration
rather than have the whole truckload thrown at someone unsuspecting.
So if a А (cyrillic) and the usual A got mixed up, at the least you asked for it!!

2. The basic 'infrastructure' of a language in C think "; {}()" operators, '#'
the quotes themselves etc is drawn exclusively from ASCII for historical reasons
that are 2015-irrelevant.

Now python (for example) has half a dozen 'quoteds'
- strings "...
- unicode strings u"..."
- triple quoted strings (can contain newlines) """..."""
- raw strings r"..." special chars like backslash are not special
etc 

And the chars like « ‹ seem to be just calling for use