How to combine Unicode characters?

What are the advantages of allowing unicode characters as variable names in Swift?

• From Apple's book for Swift Programming Language. You can use almost any character you like for constant and variable names, including Unicode characters: let Ï€ = 3.14159 let 你好 = "你好世界" let  = "dogcow" Were there any reasons besides legacy reason for other languages to not allow it? Is there any advantage of unicode characters in Swift?

• Answer:

  This is a question of notation, so I have to warn you my answer will be subjective to say the least. Programming is not just about getting the machine to do things for us.  Arguably, it's about meaningful representations of problems and our solutions to said problems.  Naturally, we need reference points like variables to keep ourselves sane while programming.  After all, I'm not sure of any programming language in use today that approaches pure data (aside from binary, but you'd have to be stark raving mad!). A well-established convention is that meaningful variable names contribute mightily to meaningful programs.  It's no wonder C programmers get teased for single-letter variable names and relentless shortening of function names: Given no context, you couldn't tell what the thing was even supposed to be doing.  The same thing applies to companies not using English.  Programs written by a firm exploiting Unicode for Tamil are going to be absolutely unmaintainable when handed to somebody who speaks basically any other language.  (Sidenote: the same is true when talking about english's stranglehold on programming). So I'll add another component to this discussion: Context.  Context is huge when programming.  Context is why we can look at functions and intuit what they do.  There is some basic assumption when reading code that you know the language, know what the code is supposed to do, and most importantly how it's accomplishing it.  Miss any one of the three and you're just reading dense gibberish.  But context for programming is very different from context in, say, mathematics, where terse notation is the wit and soul of the field.  Unicode variables are the norm when dealing with formulae, and we've come to even expect them when reading papers or solving problems.  When a mathematician gets into programming, the context they carry with them is years of working with these symbols and giving strict definitions to these symbols, not writing out strings of english characters.  It's almost ridiculous to write lambdaAbstract(x, returning: y) when you also have λx.y The beauty and tenseness of the latter expression is light years ahead of the former.  But compactness only makes sense here because the symbols have a well-defined meaning.  Showing this to anyone with no working knowledge of the λ calculus would cause them to run away screaming.  And so we have to be careful using Unicode variable names and realize that they apply to a wider audience than just our own projects. tldr; Unicode variables allow for a greater ease of internationalization, but chiefly they're meant for terseness and the proper shortening of well-defined operations.