The Eighty-Twenty Solution

There's been more discussion of whether allowing Unicode characters above code 255 in symbol names. A few people have put forward the argument that Java and C# allow this, though others have I think that this discussion is much like the argument in Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth; if a programming language can't support more than Latin-1 characters in symbols, then it will never be used by people for whom this is important. One question was

in those languages which allow (essentially) arbitrary Unicode strings as identifier names, how many programs actually take advantage of this capacity, as opposed to just sticking to straight ASCII?

. Aside from the odd concept of "straight ASCII", I think that the number of programmers doing this is probably growing, now that a number of popular languages support it.

When I was in college, one of my professors showed us an old paper A Linguistic Contribution to goto-less Programming, which I always thought was pretty funny. Apparently the paper was part of an April 1 issue of Communications of the ACM. It turns out that not only did someone actually implement the comefrom statement, but now someone's implemented it in Python.