Horrific? You might not think so if your (human) language used a different alphabet.

“Now” as in since C99, twenty-five years ago, yes. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Why shouldn't they be? It's not the 00's anymore, Unicode support is universal. You'd have to dust off some truly ancient tech to find something incapable of rendering it.

Source code is for humans, and thus should be written in whatever way makes it easiest to read, write, and understand for humans. If your language doesn't map onto ASCII, then Unicode support improves that goal. If your code is meant to directly implement some physics formula, then using the appropriate unicode characters might make it easier to read (and thus spot transcription errors, something I find far too often in physics simulations).

Math people shouldn't be allowed to write code. It's not the unicode, so much as the extremely terse variable names.

> void recip(double* aₚ, double* řₚ) > { > for (;;) > { > register double Π = (aₚ)(řₚ);

My first thought before I saw this was “I wonder is this going to be an article from people who build things or something from “academics” that don’t.”

At least it was answered quickly.