Re: Best guess at expressing a string as a variable
Re: Best guess at expressing a string as a variable
- Subject: Re: Best guess at expressing a string as a variable
- From: Keary Suska <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:32:11 -0700
On Jan 22, 2013, at 6:18 PM, Jens Alfke wrote:
> On Jan 22, 2013, at 3:28 PM, email@hidden wrote:
>
>> Is + (id)letterCharacterSet the best choice here?
>
> The API docs say "Informally, this set is the set of all characters used as letters of alphabets and ideographs.”
> Which very strongly implies it is not just ASCII, but covers all Unicode alphabets.
>
> Some languages, like Java and Go, can handle non-ASCII letters in identifiers, but most can’t. I would stick with a character set consisting of only upper and lowercase ASCII letters, digits and the underscore. And you’d probably want to force the first character to be a lowercase letter since some languages assign special meaning to identifiers that start with a capital letter or with an underscore.
I was thinking that by "language" the OP meant linguistic rather than programming. For the latter it is a bit easier to find the lowest common denominator, which is probably strictly ascii alpha and numbers, beginning with lowercase alpha and probably even a character limit of around 12. That would automatically exclude the identifier pattern example provided as most languages do not permit dashes in identifier names (that I know of). Additionally, for higher-level interpreted languages the app would need to understand identifier prefixes such as $, @ and % (and maybe &).
Best,
Keary Suska
Esoteritech, Inc.
"Demystifying technology for your home or business"
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