You're right that writing a preprocessor would be straightforward. But while you're actively editing the code, your dev experience will still be bad: the editor will flag emoji identifiers as syntax errors so mass renaming & autocompletion won't work properly. Last time I looked into this in VSCode I got TypeScript to stop complaining about syntax errors by patching the identifier validation with something like `if (code>127) return true` (if non-ascii, consider valid) in isUnicodeIdentifierStart/isUnicodeIdentifierPart [1]. But then you'd also need to patch the transpiler to JS, formatters like Prettier, and any other tool in your workflow that embeds their own version of TypeScript...
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wouldn't writing a parser of sorts that would replace emojis with a valid alphabetical string identifier be trivial?
You're right that writing a preprocessor would be straightforward. But while you're actively editing the code, your dev experience will still be bad: the editor will flag emoji identifiers as syntax errors so mass renaming & autocompletion won't work properly. Last time I looked into this in VSCode I got TypeScript to stop complaining about syntax errors by patching the identifier validation with something like `if (code>127) return true` (if non-ascii, consider valid) in isUnicodeIdentifierStart/isUnicodeIdentifierPart [1]. But then you'd also need to patch the transpiler to JS, formatters like Prettier, and any other tool in your workflow that embeds their own version of TypeScript...
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/81c951894e93bdc...