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Comment by rbinv | Hacker News Reader

I guess someone should develop an IDE/editor plugin that marks non-ASCII characters outside of string literals.

Ruby now allows (some) Unicode glyphs as names (allowing for things like Δv).

    08:11:32 >> Δv = 3
    => 3
    08:11:39 >> p Δv
    3
    => 3

My solution when I have problems like this is to start building a negative regexp in vim:

  /[^-a-zA-Z0-9 \[\]]

I then add other symbols as I find them. I can usually find the illegal characters in about 30 seconds this way—and I can add the non-ASCII glyphs that I expect to be present to my regexp.

JavaScript allows a wide range of Unicode characters - http://stackoverflow.com/a/9337047

> marks non-ASCII characters outside of string literals.

Many programming languages support non-ASCII variable name characters now.

Good point, didn't consider that. Although any good IDE/editor should catch the use of "undeclared" variables and functions.

> Many programming languages support non-ASCII variable name characters now.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

It is usually worth keeping variable names and such in English in enable international collaboration. Also non-ASCII source files can get mangled in transit.

Well, it does happen, though – look at this weather data from a large German newspaper, it is in a custom format ('|' separated values) and in German: http://wetter.bild.de/data/meinwetter.txt

It happens all the time, everywhere, that people write code and stuff in their native language.

That's data. The suggestion is about variable names.

Well, the variable names of Bild.de (for example HTML class names) are also in German.

It happens all the time, everywhere.

Vim plugin: https://github.com/vim-utils/vim-troll-stopper

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