Special characters in variable names

[Celdecea]

I was commenting some VB.NET 2003 code when on a whim I tried this:

' Note the variable is "theta" or keypad alt+233
        Dim Θ As Double = 3.14159 / 4.0
        MsgBox(Θ)

It compiled and ran fine. Without going into ethical debates, is this sort of thing really legal in the CLS? According to "Visual Basic Naming Conventions" at MSDN names must begin with an alphabetic character, but little other is said.

My assumption is that the Visual Studio family is supporting some foreign characters on the extended ascii set. I noted that other symbols like ° (alt 248) throw a "Character is not valid" error in the ide but many greek letters appear to work.

Thanks for any insights.

[DangerDev]

i tried with Hindi letter its working:

class सुचना_दो
    {
        private String _नाम = "सुचना_दो";
        public String अपनी_सुचना_दो()
        {
            String सुचना = "मेरा नाम "+_नाम+" है, मुझे फलक ने लिखा है !";
            return सुचना;
        }
    }

its working with it coz, it can deal with unicode characters.