WG15 N283

							     07 May 92

			WG15 LIAISON STATEMENT TO WG20




	WG15 has reviewed WG20 document N085 entitled "Extended
	Identifiers", which encouraged discussion of its proposal, and
	offers the following comments:

	1).  The POSIX Shell and Utilities standard (DIS 9945-2)
	     provides facilities for locale-dependent specifications of
	     character attributes that optionally are adjustable by the
	     user or application on some systems.

	2).  WG15 believes that any extensions to programming language
	     identifier requirements should be accomplished within the
	     framework described in 1). above.

	3).  WG15 contains several "small languages", such as shell and
	     awk, that it intends to enhance in this area.  It believes
	     that the proper approach would be to allow characters in
	     classification "alpha" in the current locale whenever the
	     current specifications allow alphabetics from the portable
	     character set (equivalent to the ISO 646 repertoire).  The
	     "alpha" classification may include sylabbic and ideographic
	     characters, and is named "alpha" for historic reasons.
	     Because of differing requirements in the various languages,
	     WG15 considers any additional degree of flexibility to be
	     infeasible across all languages.