newRPL - build 1255 released! [updated to 1299]

[JoJo1973]

(05-16-2019 05:19 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  

(05-16-2019 02:33 PM)JoJo1973 Wrote:  I hope you don't mind if I report a last one... A solitary dot is accepted by the parser, allowing construction of expressions such as 'SIN(.)' or '√.'

I don't mind at all... that doesn't look good.

However, the dot is a valid character in a variable name (like many other symbols), therefore '.' is a valid variable name, though a bit unsightly. The only problem is, if I add the requirement of at least one letter in the name of the variable, it would rule out variables that are greek letters for example (since greek letters are just weird Unicode symbols after all, not too different from the dot). Even banning the dot you could always find some strange unicode symbol that's not forbidden and create a strange variable name like that. I don't know what's the proper solution in this case.

IIRC, Unicode tables which you derive data from have flags to classify the code points: you could limit valid characters for identifiers to 0-9, letter-like symbols and a few selected symbols - underscore, dot (except a single dot character) and the likes.

Alternatively, you could limit the letter-like characters by blocks: Basic Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew blocks have consecutive code points and cover 99.999% of practical uses.

I guess there is not much appetite to name a variable in Runic or Balinese!