Would it be possible to add support for more than alphanumeric characters for identifiers in a future release?
Both Python and Julia allow many non-ASCII characters in identifiers, e.g. the following is valid python code:
β = [1, 2, 3]
def Σ(iter):
return sum(iter)
print(Σ(β))
For most programming I could see this mainly leading to bad variable names, but for mathematical modelling we often want to keep code fairly consistent with how we would write a model in a paper or documentation.
Also, the lack of case sensitivity and namespaces exacerbates the issue of good variable naming for large projects. From a programming point of view, I would like long self-documenting names, but these can make complicated equations difficult to read. Local namespaces might solve the same need as a larger character set.
- Martin