[swift-evolution] Prohibit invisible characters in identifier names

Charlie Monroe charlie at charliemonroe.net
Sun Jun 26 23:24:37 CDT 2016


> On Jun 25, 2016, at 7:12 AM, David Sweeris <davesweeris at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jun 24, 2016, at 23:13, Charlie Monroe via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>> 
>> BTW how far along with programming do you think you'd get without the knowledge of English? All libraries, SDKs use English identifiers. The documentation is in English. For one to lear programming without actually knowing any English would require the language to have localizable identifiers. Can you imagine those? Given how much time is put here to standardize the naming of a few methods in the standard library, how would it look in other languages?
> 
> Speaking of which, hypothetically, if we wanted to support translations of Swift itself (and the standard library), would it be better to have the compiler figure out how to make object files work across languages, or would it be better for the on-disk file to always be in the "canonical" language and have the IDE do the translation?

Historically, these languages were 100% translated and required localized compiler support (we're talking about BASIC, Pascal) since back then IDE support was quite poor. Nowadays, on-the-fly translation by the IDE would probably work out the best.

> I'm *not* proposing we do this... Just thinking about what would need to be done and how hard it would be.
> 
> - Dave Sweeris



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