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Comment by cabalamat | Hacker News Reader

Here's a program with 3 identifiers. One uses Latin alphabet, one Greek and one Cyrillic. Can you tell which is which?

   Κ = 1
   K = 2
   К = 3

As for "widely understood", consider a program that uses 10 Greek symbols each of which is known by 90% of programmers (a high estimate IMO). If the program is looked at by 10 programmers, the probability that they'll all know the symbols is 0.0027%.

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Your example is misleading because of your choice of characters (and to some degree typeface), not your choice of alphabet. You would have the same problem (and people have had the problem) using the characters 1, I, and l in identifiers.

This argument does not apply to the original example and it's an odd argument to make.

The biggest downside to using 'φ' over 'phi' is how hard the first is to type on most keyboards, and how it might be harder to google (although I just tested and copy+paste+search gives me the right answer immediately).

I'm a fan of reducing jargon, but this is a very standard symbol and I like its use in a codebase - especially one targeted at people studying mathematics.

> but this is a very standard symbol [...] especially one targeted at people studying mathematics

I've studied maths at university level and I didn't recognise phi (I thought of it as "that squiggle") in that context.

I mean I probably could've guessed it's name was psi or phi or somesuch, but I certainly wouldn't have been sure.

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