[Python-ideas] π = math.pi

[Guido van Rossum]

I think the strictness comes from the observation that the stdlib is read
and edited using *lots* of different tools and not every tool is with the
program. That argument may be weaker now than when that PEP was written,
but I still get emails and see websites with mojibake. (Most recently, the
US-PyCon badges had spaces for all non-ASCII letters.)

The argument is also weaker for comments than it is for identifiers, since
stdlib identifiers will be used through *even more* tools (anyone who uses
a name imported from stdlib). Docstrings are perhaps halfway in between.


On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 8:33 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5 June 2017 at 07:00, Guido van Rossum <gvanrossum at gmail.com> wrote:
> > AFAK it was in whatever PEP introduced Unicode identifiers.
>
> Ah, indeed it is: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3131/#policy-
> specification
>
> Interestingly, that's stricter than my draft PR for PEP 8, and I'm not
> entirely sure we follow the "string literals and comments must be in
> ASCII" part in its entirety:
>
> ============
> All identifiers in the Python standard library MUST use ASCII-only
> identifiers, and SHOULD use English words wherever feasible (in many
> cases, abbreviations and technical terms are used which aren't
> English). In addition, string literals and comments must also be in
> ASCII. The only exceptions are (a) test cases testing the non-ASCII
> features, and (b) names of authors. Authors whose names are not based
> on the Latin alphabet MUST provide a Latin transliteration of their
> names.
> ============
>
> That said, all the potential counter-examples that come to mind are in
> the documentation, but *not* in the corresponding docstrings (e.g. the
> Euro symbol used in in the docs for chr() and ord()).
>
> Cheers,
> Nick.
>
> --
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
>



-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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