Re: Why (or not) use single letter variable names?

From: Jallan (jallan_at_smrtytrek.com)
Date: 12/23/04 

Date: 23 Dec 2004 10:28:14 -0800

Herman Rubin wrote:

> If you can recognize the letters, you could read
> mathematics written with them as symbols, even if you
> did not know any of the names. I could do this with
> Russian letters, and I do not know their names.

and

> As I said, I do not need to name them. I would not
> have any problem with using Russian letters for
> symbols, but I would have a much greater problem
> if the TeX representations for them were used.

The question of which characters ought to be used for creating variable
identifiers has been a Unicode issue for some time and a Unicode
technical document treating this issue has been several times updated.

Oddities appear, such as which do not correspond between uppercase and
lower case, which mean in a computer language which is
case-insensitive, _ß_ in lowercase should match with _SS_ in
uppercase which means also that _ß_ in lowercase must match with _ss_
in lowercase: variables fooß, FOOSS, and fooss (and FoOsS and so
forth) should be treated as identical.

The current technical annex covering this appears at
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr31/tr31-3.html . It reads in part:

<< The formal syntax provided here is intended to capture the general
intent that an identifier consists of a string of characters that
begins with a letter or an ideograph, and then includes any number of
letters, ideographs, digits, or underscores. Each programming language
standard has its own identifier syntax; different programming languages
have different conventions for the use of certain characters from the
ASCII range ($, @, #, _) in identifiers. To extend such a syntax to
cover the full behavior of a Unicode implementation, implementers need
only combine these specific rules with the syntax provided here. >>

Using full Unicode letters and ideographs in c and similar languages
could be used to make such languages even more difficult to readm, even
for programmers who recognize non-Latin letters and ideographs, as
letter character U+01C0 LATIN LETER DENTAL CLICK is identical in
appearance to the ASCII | symbol and U+01C3 LATIN LETTER RETROFLEX
CLICK is identical in appearance to the ASCII ! symbol. Also many
uppercase Greek and Cyrillic characters are identical in appearance to
particular Latin characters and to each other. The occasional confusion
now between 1 and l (one and "el") in reading code would be greatly
extended.

Jallan

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