[swift-evolution] [Proposal] Refining Identifier and Operator Symbology

[Brent Royal-Gordon]

I was in the middle of writing about my opposition to the original proposal when I went to bed last night, and was going to advocate something like this:

> Given the current state of the discussion over in Unicode land, I think it would probably be safe from a compatibility standpoint to admit code points that fall into the following (Unicode-style) code point set:
> 
> [:S:] - [:Sc:] - [:xidcontinue:] - [:nfcqc=n:] & [:scx=Common:] - pictographics - emoji

I suspect we can probably also do something about emoji, since I doubt UAX #31 is going to. Given that they are all static pictures of people or things, I think we can decide they are all nouns and thus all identifier characters. If we think there are some which might be declared operators later, we can exclude them for now, but I'd like to at least see the bulk of them brought in.

I think addressing emoji is important not for any technical reason, but for nontechnical ones. Emoji are a statement about Swift's modern approach; modernity is important. They are fun and whimsical; whimsy is important.

And most importantly, emoji identifiers are part of Swift's culture. It's widely understood that you don't use them in real code, but they are very common in examples. Just as we worry about source compatibility and binary compatibility, so we should worry about culture compatibility. Removing emoji would cause a gratuitous cultural regression.

-- 
Brent Royal-Gordon
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