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   James Widman (jameswidman@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jul-2026 11:31:14 JST James Widman

   a nice unexpected benefit of godbolt.org is that it's making me aware of more system languages.

   today, i learned about the C3 language via the godbolt language pull-down menu.

   for prototyping purposes (not for production, which requires memory safety), C3 seemed to check a lot of boxes.

   but then i got to the part where it milkshake-ducks itself:
   https://c3-lang.org/faq/rejected-ideas/#unicode-identifiers

   they might as well have asked, "why would anyone think in their native language, even in their personal experimental code?"

   • Embed this notice
     James Widman (jameswidman@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jul-2026 11:31:14 JST James Widman

     in reply to

     unicode mavens, please correct me if i'm wrong, but this:

     > "Furthermore there are practical issues, such as bidirectional text [...]"

     does _not_ seem applicable to the question of whether a _compiler_ should allow non-ascii characters in identifiers. (iiuc, you only need to worry about bidi stuff when you're rendering glyphs. and compilers generally don't have render pipelines.)

     so this seems like a bullshit excuse.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Jul-2026 11:31:14 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @JamesWidman Yes, it's bullshit. On top of being purely a presentation issue (which nonetheless does admittedly intersect with security/trust issues), there are published standards for how languages are supposed to do this without making a mess.

     Rejecting those standards and saying "fuck you, speak English" is just the devs telling us who they are.