On Tue, Apr 14, 2026 at 7:22 PM Damian McGuckin <[email protected]> wrote:
> My few European friends with names which need UTF-8 characters (umlauts)
> have for quite a while been spelling the names in a form which avoided the
> need for UTF-8. Just a comment.

Valid point.  While the decision isn't mine, as I don't have commit
privs to the groff tree, I consider it a sign of respect for volunteer
contributors to spell their names correctly, even names that can be
transliterated to an ASCII approximation.  Barriers to reading UTF-8
text files are few in 2026.

> variables related to (say) the square of a variable x were written as x
> with a UTF-8 suprtscript of 2. I was amazed at how difficult the code was
> to read.

No, that sounds like a terrible naming scheme.  Even though C++
doesn't use ² as a mathematical operator, one's first instinct on
reading "y = x² " will be "assign y the square of the variable x," not
"assign y the value of a variable named x² ".  It's needlessly
misleading.  "y = x_squared" conveys the same intended info without
adding an easily avoidable fake-out.

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