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

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 1:10 PM, Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> A few other thoughts:
>
> * One of our (or at least my) overarching goals for this proposal is to
> refine identifier and operator sets by moving away from an ad-hoc
> character-by-character approach to a systematic treatment that relies on
> well-defined criteria to select blocks of characters for inclusion.
>

I completely agree with this, up to the point where you wrote "select
blocks". That doesn't seem to be the way things are selected in the Unicode
universe.

We can choose to adopt blocks as an interim measure, but we should not
loose sight of the notion that this should eventually be property-driven.

* Particularly if the community insists on emoji being identifiers, we will
> have to critically evaluate how to proceed on that in tandem with
> operators, because there exist emojified operators and arrows, and certain
> emoji are encoded in blocks that are otherwise symbols, which Unicode is
> likely to deem as operators in the future.
>

This is not correct. The current view in the UAX31 discussion is that
emojis and pictographics should be excluded from *both* types of
identifiers so that individual programming languages can make
language-specific choices.

The main current problem is that there is no clear-cut Unicode property
covering Emojis at the present time, which is something that needs to be
resolved over in Unicode-land. There is a list given in the antique texty
UCD file format, but it isn't part of the XML formulation of the UCD
database. I'll be generating a proposed update shortly, and when I have
that I can provide a working list in the form of a C file that can be used
by Swift.

I have a mild preference that emojis should live in conventional
identifiers if they are adopted.


>  Moreover, IIUC, certain codepoints can be either emoji or non-emoji
> symbols and variant selectors can specify which they are...
>

Can you expand on this and (hopefully) point me at the appropriate spot in
one of the Unicode TRs?


Thanks!


Jonathan
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