[swift-evolution] A path forward on rationalizing unicode identifiers and operators

[Chris Lattner]

> On Sep 30, 2017, at 4:12 PM, Xiaodi Wu <xiaodi.wu at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I’m happy to participate in the reshaping of the proposal. It would be nice to gather a group of people again to help drive it forward.

Awesome, thank you!

> That said, it’s unclear to me that superscript T is clearly an operator, any more than would be superscript H (Hermitian), superscript 2, superscript 3, etc. But at any rate, this would be discussion for the future workgroup.

Yeah, a future proposal can debate that.  For now, any of these that are currently accepted should get sidelined into the “unclear” bucket in order to make progress.

Just FWIW, IMO, these make sense as operators specifically because they are commonly used by math people as operations that transform the thing they are attached to.  Superscript 2 is a function that squares its operand.  That said, perhaps there are other uses that I’m not aware of which get in the way of the utilitarian interpretation.  Such is a discussion for a future round after the active damage is fixed :)

> I would strongly advocate that the things-that-are-identifiers group be strongly tied to the existing, complete Unicode standard for such, and that the critical parts of the previous document about normalization be retained.

Makes sense if there is something that covers the right bases.  We certainly don’t want to be enumerating every accented letter codepoint, and allowing people to write words in non-english languages as identifiers is important.  I’m not familiar enough to know if there are any unicode standard that includes “just the stuff we want” though.

-Chris