[plt-scheme] Unicode, take 3

> Hi Matthew, sound's interesting, but it still confounds me as to how this
> actually truly benefits either the language in general, or Mz/DrScheme in
> particular; as it would seem to complicate both, predominantly only enabling
> the development of potentially non-portable, and illegible scheme code if it
> becomes sanctioned to compose scheme code from nearly arbitrary character
> sets, and language scripting rules.

> I did read your explanation carefully, but honestly couldn't identify any
> truly redeeming benefits, although suspect if I spoke Chinese I might feel
> otherwise; but still suspect no characters other than those in the basic
> ASCII subset should be enabled to compose officially portable code.

> It should be interesting to see if advanced features like this will be
> blessed or cursed through the test of time.

In a pedagogic setting it is important that the students can express
themselves in their own language. This becomes more and more important
the weaker the students are. [Anecdote: At one math test I wondered why
the students skipped a particular exercise on some (easy) probability
theory. When asked they told me, that they didn't know what to do,
because they couldn't understand the question (copied from a real exam).
When I explained the problem in easier terms, they could do the exercise]

I love the fact that I (already today) can use names like kø (queue) in
code meant for students. And The advantage for chinese students
are greater than for mine (despite all we only have three difficult
letters æ,ø and å all wovels).

-- 
Jens Axel Søgaard