Description:
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From the variables chapter we can read :

? Variable names follow the same rules as other labels in PHP. A valid variable name starts with a letter or underscore, followed by any number of letters, numbers, or underscores. As a regular expression, it would be expressed thus: '[a-zA-Z_\x7f-\xff][a-zA-Z0-9_\x7f-\xff]*'

    Note: For our purposes here, a letter is a-z, A-Z, and the ASCII characters from 127 through 255 (0x7f-0xff). ?

As many languages use other character sets, I was wondering if there was any plan to support UNICODE to name variables and other PHP labels. As I told the Zend support : ? It would allow french and asian developers to write their scripts in their own language. Not sure about the impact on performances though. ?. For example in french we often use the ? ? ? characters, we call it ? e in o ? because it looks like ? oe ?, it's used in words like ? c?ur ? (heart) or ? n?ud ? (node). The problem is that some characters are supported, some others are not. For example the ? ? ? character, ? e in a ? is part of the ASCII character set, its ASCII character code is 0xE6. It means PHP does support scripts using this character, because 0xE6 is between 0x7f and 0xff. But ? ? ? is not an ASCII character, it's the ? Latin Small Lagature Oe ? UNICODE character.

To sum things up, the idea is to allow developers to write PHP scripts using their natural language. French developers would be able to write scripts in french, using our weird ? Latin Small Lagature ? characters, chinese and japanese developers would be able to use their favourite KANJI to name their variables, classes...

I think the PHP team decided to choose this regular expression to improve the script parsing performance, but I'm sure there's a solution to support UNICODE. It could be an option to enable from the PHP configuration file for example, or using a Apache .htaccess file. Beside the performance penalty there might be an other problem. Allowing us to use the whole UNICODE character set means we would be able to name our variables ? c?ur♥ ? (last character code is x2665, it represents a black heart) or ? ♀♂ ? (male and female symbols) instead of ? human_class ?. I'm sure the PHP team will point out other issues but as I'm not a hardcore Zend engine developer, It's all what I can think of :).

I join the ? n?ud ? class script if you want to try it. The PHP parser returns a parse error at line 9 (? private $nom; ?).

Jean-Marc Molina.

Reproduce code:
---------------
<?php

/**
Classe n?ud.
*/

class n?ud
{
	private $nom;
	
	public function __construct ()
	{
		$this->nom = "N?ud sans nom";
	}
}

?>