[Python-ideas] Accepting "?" as a valid character for identifiers

[average]

> Another drawback of introducing such a convention this late in the design
> of
> the language is that you can never have it applied consistently.  Changing
> the builtin and stdlib instances alone would need hundreds of compatibility
> aliases.
>
> Actually, I think this would improve the standard library dramatically.
Particularly, if it was coupled with a complete redesign/philosophy for
naming conventions with respect to verb/noun, methods/properties,
adverbs/adjectives (as modifiers to their respective parts of speech).
There are always judgment calls for some of these items, but that probably
signifies a refactoring is in order because there shouldn't probably be any
ambiguity in a part of speech.  (I don't know -- this is an interesting CS
language-design issue.  Anyone know of any work done in this area?)  Case
should also be re-considered carefully also.

In general when one comes to code that one hasn't seen or designed, without
more syntactical support to indicate semantics of all the many identifiers,
I've found myself too-easily dismissive of re-using code because of all the
work it takes to work out the meaning and the idiosyncracies of the
individuals -- it's like wearing someone else's underwear.

marcos
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