> Does that at least work for all Unicode characters that support case distinction...
Erlang was designed and first written back in the 1980's, so characters that fall within the latin1 encoding are the only acceptable characters in atom and variable names. However, UTF-8 source files are fully supported, as is Unicode in lists and binaries. There is a proposal to make Unicode characters accepted for atom and variable names, but it hasn't been accepted yet, as the details are (as you allude to) tricky. [0]
> The designer of a non-clusterfuck syntax would be offended by [the conclusion that I came to].
I can't agree with that. Initially, I thought that the case-significance was strange, but -as I used the language- I quickly found that the ability to distinguish at a glance between an atom and non-atom type is very valuable. These are things that you don't understand until you learn about the language, and maybe actually use it some.
Erlang's syntax is strange, but not even within ICBM distance to being a clusterfuck. Frankly, Python's significant whitespace has caused me far more lost hours than any strangeness in Erlang's syntax.
> I only formed this hypothesis because I'm jaded.
Heh. I expect that the fact that you've likely seen many imperative and some functional languages in your day, and that Erlang is -despite its syntax quirks- a language that is rather well designed and makes sense once you look at it for a few minutes, has far more to do with it than your disaffectedness. :) [1]
From your other comment:
> I promise you, I will not write another word anywhere about Erlang.
That's a pity. Erlang is rather quite good at what it's designed to do, and a real pleasure to use. Many folks report that Elixir is at least as rewarding to work with.
[1] As an aside, I note that in your opening comment, you mention that the syntax is "incomprehensible rubbish", but yet you correctly determined a pertinent feature of the language syntax in very little time at all. This kinda puts the lie to your claims of incomprehensibility. ;)
Erlang was designed and first written back in the 1980's, so characters that fall within the latin1 encoding are the only acceptable characters in atom and variable names. However, UTF-8 source files are fully supported, as is Unicode in lists and binaries. There is a proposal to make Unicode characters accepted for atom and variable names, but it hasn't been accepted yet, as the details are (as you allude to) tricky. [0]
> The designer of a non-clusterfuck syntax would be offended by [the conclusion that I came to].
I can't agree with that. Initially, I thought that the case-significance was strange, but -as I used the language- I quickly found that the ability to distinguish at a glance between an atom and non-atom type is very valuable. These are things that you don't understand until you learn about the language, and maybe actually use it some.
Erlang's syntax is strange, but not even within ICBM distance to being a clusterfuck. Frankly, Python's significant whitespace has caused me far more lost hours than any strangeness in Erlang's syntax.
> I only formed this hypothesis because I'm jaded.
Heh. I expect that the fact that you've likely seen many imperative and some functional languages in your day, and that Erlang is -despite its syntax quirks- a language that is rather well designed and makes sense once you look at it for a few minutes, has far more to do with it than your disaffectedness. :) [1]
From your other comment:
> I promise you, I will not write another word anywhere about Erlang.
That's a pity. Erlang is rather quite good at what it's designed to do, and a real pleasure to use. Many folks report that Elixir is at least as rewarding to work with.
[0] http://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0040.html
[1] As an aside, I note that in your opening comment, you mention that the syntax is "incomprehensible rubbish", but yet you correctly determined a pertinent feature of the language syntax in very little time at all. This kinda puts the lie to your claims of incomprehensibility. ;)