[Lazarus] Proposal: Allow Umlaute and Accented Characters in Identifiers

[Special]

Am 03.07.2020 um 14:55 schrieb Péter Gábor via lazarus:
> Hi!
>
> Then you must allow Cyrillic,d Arabic and so Chinese and other national
> and special characters to be used in identifiers.
> There was a thread about this issue on the list (or maybe on fpc's one)
> and (as I can remember) the conclusion was that it's a bad idea.
> To keep source codes universally readable and understandable the special
> and national characters must be avoided in the language itself (and so
> in identifiers).
>
>
> 2020. 07. 03. 14:09 keltezéssel, Special via lazarus írta:
>> Hi,
>>
>> we have many Delphi programs with identifiers containing parts like
>> 'Köln' and 'Liège'. These programs we want to convert to Lazarus.
>> Unfortunately, Lazarus (or FP) seems not to be able to use identifiers
>> with umlaute and accents. Maybe the reason for this could be pure
>> historical and stem from the pre Unicode epoche.
>>
>> Manually chanching all those identifiers and modifying the references
>> to them is not very elegant. By the way: Using the international names
>> The international name of 'München', for instance, is 'Monaco', the
>> same name as that for the Grimaldi Imperium.
>>
>> Circumscribing is also no option. The name of Müllerstadt is
>> 'Müllerstadt' and not 'Muellerstadt'.
>>
>> Could Lazarus (and/or maybe Free Pascal) be improved to tolerate those
>> identfiers?
>>
>> Regards  --  Joe

Hi, Peter,

on a Elementary  School near Heidelberg the nine-years-old pupils learn 
programming with Delphi 10.3 Community Edition. In one of the programs 
they use 'Type ZimmerType = (Küche, Wohnzimmer, Schlafzimmer);",  
translated something like  "Type RoomType = (Kitchen, LeavingRoon, 
BedRoom)".  Their English skills are poor, they don't yet know the 
meaning of 'Kitchen'. So their teacher was happy to be able to use "Küche".

As we see, Pascal is not only a programming language for professionals 
with the need for code universally (and internationally) readable, but 
also for kids on elementary schools. Why should it be forbidden for them 
to use "Küche"?  No one is forced to use identifiers with umlaute and  
accents, if Lazarus would allow that, if he wishes to write 
internationally readable code.

I think, it should be the decision of the programmer, to write 
internationally or nationally better understandable code. He should not 
be forced to avoid "Köln" and "Liège", as Lazarus does.

By the way, Python 3 (actually a programmimng language with very much 
more users than Pascal in all its flavours) deliberately allows "Liège".

Regards --  Joe