[I18n-sig] Re: Strawman Proposal (2): Encoding attributes

[Tim Peters]

[Tim]
> "Forced" presumes it's against their will.  That's what I
> question.  There is nothing more Eurocentric than to embark
> on unilateral crusades for the purported benefit of non-
> Euros who aren't asking for help <0.7 wink>.

[/F]
> if you think that ASCII is good enough for european languages,

No, but programming language identifiers are an artificial language.  Python
isn't it itself a word processor, and you may as well complain that Python
requires "." in numeric literals (rather than ",", or an American Indian
glyph meaning "sacred fork between the mighty Integer and Fractional rivers"
<0.9 wink>).

> or that europeans like having to use an approximation of their
> own language

Ditto.

> just because american programmers are lazy,

It's really that Euros are too lazy to learn English <wink>.

> I'm not sure you should be on this list at all <wink>.

Unclear whether you're arguing to allow full Unicode in Python identifiers
(which is all I'm talking about).  You really want getattr() to sort out
Unicode in full generality (thinking specifically of "ignorable"
characters -- if you don't ignore them, you're screwing somebody else's
native tongue) at runtime?  I don't want to see Python get anywhere that
mess.  If you're implementing a word processor *in* Python, fine, you can
deal with it and Python should support you.  It doesn't need to complicate
its own artificial language to do so.