Support larger character set for identifiers

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mkbonde
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Support larger character set for identifiers

Post by mkbonde »

Would it be possible to add support for more than alphanumeric characters for identifiers in a future release?

Both Python and Julia allow many non-ASCII characters in identifiers, e.g. the following is valid python code:

Code: Select all

β = [1, 2, 3]

def Σ(iter):
  return sum(iter)

print(Σ(β))
For most programming I could see this mainly leading to bad variable names, but for mathematical modelling we often want to keep code fairly consistent with how we would write a model in a paper or documentation.

Also, the lack of case sensitivity and namespaces exacerbates the issue of good variable naming for large projects. From a programming point of view, I would like long self-documenting names, but these can make complicated equations difficult to read. Local namespaces might solve the same need as a larger character set.

- Martin
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