Re: What "Unicode support" really means

Stas Malyshev wrote:

Ah, OK, I'd only been considering Unicode*values* here. I would tend to

think of Unicode*identifiers* as a completely separate issue. There are I would suggest just not doing it. The need for unicode identifiers is not that great. I know, English is not the only language on Earth, but I can survive without naming my functions in Russian or Hebrew. And the amount of complexity that would remove from the engine IMO would be substantial (think of normalization alone...). Unless we find some magic library that automatically solves it - in which I don't really believe - I'd rather keep engine identifiers simple.

I think that this is the sole area where we need to come to an agreement before some decisions are made. But it's not that easy since 'some magic library' is the thing I think we are all looking for :) Where projects are case sensitive the 'decision' to allow unicode variables was less of a problem. They are just a little longer than conventional variables. It is the very fact that case insensitivity is part of PHP that is making this difficult. Like you Stas I can get away with 'English' names, but the major problem I am seeing is not so much Function names, but simply keys in arrays. If one is working with current versions of databases that ARE using unicode for field names, then the key names for associative arrays need to handle unicode! This is the underlying idea that I'm trying t cover by suggesting that 'English' is interpreted a little more flexibly and just allows names that do not cause problems with case insensitivity. HOWEVER I do think that there is a very strong case for simply dropping case insensitivity in PHP6 so that people can start using their own languages when writing code. One of the major advantages of PHP USED to be that one could look in the script files and understand what they are doing. Many of the shorthand 'improvements' make that more difficult, but not having to mix English function names with Russian or other language comments makes sense to me ... and I only speak English .... I do think this is the key sticking point on planning the roadmap? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk