Support for non-english characters?

Question

Is support for non-english characters common in programming languages? I mean, technically, I would think it is feasable, but I don't have any experience in anything other than english, so I don't know how common it is. I know that there are non-english based programming languages, but can something like C#, C++, C, Java, or Python support non-english classes/methods/variables?

Example in go (url, http://play.golang.org/p/wRYCNVdbjC)

package main

import "fmt"

type 世界 struct {
    世界 string
}

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, 世界")
    世界 := new(世界)
    世界.世界 = "hello world"
    fmt.Println(世界.世界)
}

Answer 1

Support for non-ASCII literals is present in virtually every modern language. That is, you can write something like japanese = "今日は世界" in Java, Python, Go, C#, Ruby, etc.

Support for non-ASCII identifiers, that is, things like 英語で = "Hello world" is also widespread. Languages that allow this, among others, are: Java, Python 3, but not 2 and 1, C#, etc.

Take a look at this lengthy list.

Answer 2

For C#, the CLI Specification permits this

A source file is an ordered sequence of Unicode characters.

An identifier in a conforming program must be in the canonical format defined by Unicode Normalization Form C, as defined by Unicode Standard Annex 15. The behavior when encountering an identifier not in Normalization Form C is implementation-defined; however, a diagnostic is not required.

I've actually made a quick program almost entirely coded in Korean here out of curiosity. After having my code reviewed, me and my colleagues unanimously agreed that not only this makes the code harder to read, but particularly harder to write as it requires the coder to continuously toggle the character set between English/Non English.

I'm all for Unicode and internalization and stuff.. but for programming, I cannot really see the value of coding in other languages than English. Pragmatism is an important virtue to have as a programmer.

Answer 3

Erm... In the past I'd been programming in English but to support Asian language (mostly Chinese) in the UI.

For most of the coding, we use English. Only for the UI matter, i.e. label in Windows Forms, Row Header in GridView, text within html/aspx, we will use Chinese.

Thus, we won't code something like this...

type 世界 struct {
     世界 string
}

But will have things like

<b>你好, 欢迎你到来。</b>

Answer 4

Almost all languages support non-ASCII characters directly or indirectly.

E.g. in Java you can directly give the non-ASCII characters; But in C# you have to use an escape character sequence i.e.\u00e1 for á.

Support for non-ASCII is also dependent on the text editor you are using.