FW: [mercury-users] Records

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

	I'd agree that we're stuck with ASCII when it comes to writing programs,
	at least for the time being (is it possible to add UNICODE comments using 
	UTF-8 encoding? What about UNICODE identifiers?).

I note that
 - Ada 95 adopted Unicode, allowing any characters in comments and (wide)
   strings, but not yet in identifiers
 - Javascript (according to ECMA 262, which is supposed to be pretty
   much the same as the ISO version) allows any Unicode character in
   strings and comments, but not identifiers.
 - IBM's PL/I allowed DBCS characters in comments and strings more than
   a decade ago
 - Quintus Prolog allowed 16-bit characters (coded as sequences of
   8-bit characters) in strings and identifiers, including operators,
   more than a decade ago.  It would not have taken much work to make
   them work as single characters.
 - the proposed revision of Erlang (Erlang 5) is Unicode throughout.
 - HTML4 and XML are Unicode (HTML3.2 was Latin1)
 - Java, ANSI C++, and C9x all allow Unicode characters in comments,
   (String,wchar_t*,wchar_t*) strings, *and in identifiers*, using the
   same syntax.

In short, if I am willing to put up with Java, I can have Unicode
identifiers *right now*.  Every Netscape or Internet Explorer browser
implements not one but _two_ programming languages with Unicode support.

As for transport through broken mail systems, there are two fairly
obvious routes:
 - utilites to convert to/from Java-like \uhhhh \Uhhhhhhhh coding
 - utilities to convert to/from HTML using &#dddd; coding.
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