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Comment by orangepanda | Hacker News Reader

Php supports kebab-case variables:

    ${"variable-name"}=123;

Isnt it beautiful?

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I agree that kebab variables aren't to my taste either, but I am partial to the notion of kebab-case keywords that I encountered in a JEP draft [0]. It suggests expanding the keyword vocabulary with a form that is otherwise invalid syntax, similar to how java treats module-info.java and package-info.java as valid files, but rejects any other hyphenated java class filename.

[0] https://openjdk.org/jeps/8223002

Pretty ugly. Scala does it like this:

    var `variable-name` = 123
    `variable-name` = 456

Looks much cleaner to me.

So does python I suppose

    locals()["kebab-case"]=123

Perl, too. (Probably not a coincidence.)

You can also put a newline in a variable name if you really want. Or a 0 byte.

Here's a demo. I've used the debugger because its "X" command can print the true name of the variable:

    $ perl -d -e 1

    Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.60
    Editor support available.

    Enter h or 'h h' for help, or 'man perldebug' for more help.

    main::(-e:1):       1
      DB<1> ${"variable-name"} = 123;

      DB<2> ${"variable\nname"} = 456;

      DB<3> ${"variable\0name"} = 789;

      DB<4> X ~variable
    $variable^@name = 789
    $variable^Jname = 456
    $variable-name = 123

How many languages support kebab case with any Unicode dash that isn't the ASCII one? :)

Probably any language that supports Unicode identifiers.

At the moment, the only one I know for sure is Agda.

I suspect java would work as well, not sure about golang unicode var naming.

play.golang wouldn't let me use figure (‒, U+2012), endash (–, U+2013) or emdash (—, U+2014) in a variable name directly.

But then the spec[1] says that only code points characterised as "Letter", an underscore, or characterised as "Number, decimal digit" are valid.

[1] https://go.dev/ref/spec#Identifiers

Coptic Small Letter Dialect-P Ni should work, looks like a hyphen.

Go Playground: https://go.dev/play/p/kxgOcEWsznz

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2CBB

Oh, neat catch!

F# allows arbitrary names within double-backtick identifiers. The following is a valid declaration, where I've used a hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash:

    let ``foo-bar–baz—quux`` = 3

Agda does, but it also supports a plain ascii hyphen in identifiers. It allows operator characters inside identifiers and requires spaces around operators otherwise (as proposed in the article). So you can use x-y as an identifier:

    x-y : ℤ → ℤ → ℤ
    x-y x y = x - y

The Agda community also heavily uses unicode characters. I've even seen a unicode colon used for a custom syntax because the ascii colon was unavailable.

> The Agda community also heavily uses unicode characters.

Wise move.

Finally a language from the 21 century.

Still sticking to ASCII is madness. Especially as most people on this planet don't use ASCII as their native char set.

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