carbon-lang/docs/design/lexical_conventions/words.md

Words

Table of contents

• Overview
• Alternatives

Overview

A word is a lexical element formed from a sequence of letters or letter-like characters, such as fn or Foo or Int.

The exact lexical form of words has not yet been settled. However, Carbon will follow lexical conventions for identifiers based on Unicode Annex #31. TODO: Update this once the precise rules are decided; see the Unicode source files proposal.

Alternatives

We could restrict words to ASCII.

Advantages:

• Reduced implementation complexity.
• Avoids all problems relating to normalization, homoglyphs, text directionality, and so on.
• We have no intention of using non-ASCII characters in the language syntax or in any library name.
• Provides assurance that all names in libraries can reliably be typed by all developers -- we already require that keywords, and thus all ASCII letters, can be typed.

Disadvantages:

• An overarching goal of the Carbon project is to provide a language that is inclusive and welcoming. A language that does not permit names in programs to be expressed in the developer's native language will not meet that goal for at least some of our developers.