On 12/12/2014, 7:34 AM, Jan Kim wrote: > On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 06:01:22AM -0500, Duncan Murdoch wrote: >> On 12/12/2014, 4:12 AM, Bj??rn-Helge Mevik wrote: >>> Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> writes: >>> >>>> users of other languages may want to have messages and variable names >>>> in their native language, and ASCII might not be enough for that. >>> >>> Allowing for messages in non-ASCII encodings would probably be a good >>> idea, but I think allowing non-ASCII variable names is dangerous. >> >> Dangerous in what way? >> >> I agree that CRAN probably shouldn't accept packages like that, at least >> for exported symbols: packages there should run anywhere. But I >> suspect that the majority of R packages are for private use, and will >> never be sent to CRAN. Do you know any reason that non-ASCII names >> would be dangerous for those? >> >> Duncan Murdoch >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > I'm would perhaps not go as far as calling them dangerous, but non-ASCII > characters in code are a mixed blessing which personally I'd opt to not > have, on balance. Being German I can understand that people may want > umlauted characters in their variable names, but where this catches on, > it's just a matter of time that people get characters into their code that > are different but indistinguishable in the font they use (I've seen this > with \H{o} rather than a \"{o}), and mega-personmonths are wasted puzzling > over tracking down these problems. > > While many packages are used in-house at least initially, making a > package is a step towards releasing it, so I'd anticipate that having > an option to support weeding out any potentially troublesome identifiers > has the potential to do some good.
That's a good point. I guess I'm thinking of Asian languages where the transliteration into ASCII loses a lot of information, and (I'm told) is uncomfortable for native speakers to read. I think R should be usable in those languages in a way that is comfortable for them, but they should be warned that doing so limits portability. Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
