Formal comment #178 (enhancement)

should allow quoting non-letters in identifiers
Reported by: 	Per Bothner
Version:	5.92

Summary: allow escaping non-constituent characters in identifiers

Common Lisp and many Scheme implementations provide a way to escape
certain characters to force them to be viewed as constituents of
identifiers (and hence symbols).

The draft does allow <inline hex escape> to serve this need, but such
hex escapes are not very readable or user-friendly.

Traditionally, one or both of these have been used:

|123|
\123

We may not want to reserve | for this purpose, but \ is already in use
for escapes, and it is easy to extend it. I suggest:

<initial> --> <constituent> | <special initial>
   | <inline escape>

<inline escape> -->
   | <inline hex escape>
   | \<character name>;
   | \<any character whose category is none of Lu, Ll, Lt, Lm, or Lo>


RESPONSE:

In revising the syntax for symbols, the editors wanted to avoid any
visual confusion from identifiers that include spaces, parentheses,
and other characters not visually apparent to be part of an
identifier.  The proposal of the formal comment (as well as the |...|
syntax) does not meet this requirement.