g++ unicode variable name

Question

I am trying to use unicode variable names in g++.

It does not appear to work.

Does g++ not support unicode variable names, ... or is there some subset of unicode (from which I'm not testing in).

Thanks!

Answer 1

You have to specify the -fextended-identifiers flag when compiling, you also have to use \uXXXX or \uXXXXXXXX for unicode(atleast in gcc it's unicode)

Identifiers (variable/class names etc) in c++ can't be of utf-8/utf-16 or whatever encoding, they have to be:

identifier:
  nondigit
  identifier nondigit
  identifier digit

a nondigit is

nondigit: one of
  universalcharactername
  _ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

and a universalcharactername is

universalcharactername:
  \UXXXXXXXX
  \uXXXX

Thus, if you save your source file as UTF-8, you cannot have a variable like e.g.:

int høyde = 10;

it had to be written like:

int h\00F8yde = 10;

(which imo would beat the whole purpose - so just stick with a-z)