funny characters in identifiers?

[Per Bothner]

Is there a plan/consensus for how to handle "illegal" characters
in identifiers?  I'm primarily interested in the bytecode level,
not the Java source level.  For example identifiers like '/'
used for division in Scheme.  It would be good to have a standard
way to deal with this.

One solution is to use a reversible mangling transformation.
That's not necessarily ideal - for example it might be better to
translate a Scheme hyphenated name 'open-input-file' to Java style
'openInputFile' for interoperability with Java, but Scheme code
still needs a way to get the original name.

(Kawa current solves this by translating open-input-file to
an openInputFile method plus a static final Procedure-valued
field 'open$Mninput$Mnfile'.)

A general solution would seem to be to use an annotation.  That
is what we did for JavaFX.  Specifically:

/**
  * Annotation to indicate the JavaFX source name a member derives from.
  * Used when a the name was "mangled" to field a member name.
  */
@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Documented
@Target({METHOD, FIELD, TYPE})
public @interface SourceName {
     String value();
}

It would be nice to standardize on an annotation type.

It would also be nice to generalize to support XML (and CommonLisp) 
two-part names.
Perhaps:

public @interface SourceName {
     String value();
     String prefix() default "";
     String namespaceURI() default "";
}
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per at bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/