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Asked: 2026-05-16T18:19:58+00:00

When I see a small program which is written for some students, I often

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When I see a small program which is written for some students, I often see something like this: (haskell, german):

ueber = "What the haeck!"

instead of

über = "What the häck!"

As many modern languages are specified to allow non-standard charactes in declaration names via UTF-8, is there a special reason for avoiding these in a project, which is sure to be only for people who are able to input these characters (say for a team of german students?) or is this just a historical reason?

I know, that you should keep names in a-zA-Z_0-9 if you develop an applicaio internationally, but are there any reason for avoiding this in a “local” project?

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  1. Editorial Team

    is there a special reason for avoiding these in a project, which is sure to be only for people who are able to input these characters

    That is certainly the main reason. Other reasons that come to mind is that many development tools, search functions, editors, parsers, documentors, code search engines etc. will not expect non-ASCII input in code.

    Also, you never know where your code may be used one day! The smallest innocent school project can grow into a nice Open-Source tool that gets used around the globe one day. In that case, ASCII is the smallest common denominator, at least at the moment.

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