Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[Chris Liechti]

"John Roth" <johnroth at ameritech.net> wrote in 
news:udol0hpg2g9gf7 at news.supernews.com:

> "Martin v. Loewis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote in message
> news:m3wuucbjlb.fsf at mira.informatik.hu-berlin.de...
>> Erno Kuusela <erno-news at erno.iki.fi> writes:
>>
>> > | You mean, non-english-speaking people are prevented from using
> FORTRAN
>> > | and C? Can you name someone specifically? I don't know any such
> person.
>> >
>> > i don't know such people either. but since many people only know
>> > languages that aren't written in ascii, it seems fairly probable
> that
>> > they exist.
>>
>> I really question this claim. Most people that develop software (or
>> would be interested in doing so) will learn the latin alphabet at
>> school - even if they don't learn to speak English well.
> 
> The trouble is that while almost all of the languages used in the
> Americas, Australia and Western Europe are based on
> the Latin alphabet, that isn't true in the rest of the world, and
> even then, it gets uncomfortable if your particular language's
> diacritical marks aren't supported. You can't do really good,
> descriptive names.
> 
> And good, descriptive names are one of the bedrocks of
> good software.

true, but how i'm supposed to use the nice chinese module which uses class 
names i can't even type on my keyboard?

[...] 
> 3. There must be a complete set of syntax words in each
> supported language. That is, words such as 'and', 'or', 'if', 'else'
> All such syntax words in a particular module must come from the
> same language.

uff, this sounds evil to me. this means i could write "wenn" for an "if" in 
german etc.? that would effectively downgrade python to a beginners only 
language because the diffrent addon modules you find on the net are just a 
chaotic language mix, unusable for a commercial project.

many modules on the net would not work in your language or if they would at 
least execute you would still unable to look at the sourcecode, extend it, 
understand it (ok it would solve the obfuscated code questions that show up 
from time to time ;-).
we like open source, don't we? but if there were such many language 
variants it became very difficult to work together.

if you say now that if one intends to make a module public, one could aways 
choose to write it in english, i don't think thats a good argument. many 
modules start as a private project, a quick hack etc. but then they're made 
public. look at Alex's post for more good arguments...


> 4. All syntax words are preceeded by a special character, which
> is not presented to the viewer by Python 3.0 aware tools. Instead,
> the special character is used to pick them out and highlight them.
> The reason for this is that the vocabulary of syntax words can then
> be expanded without impacting existing programs - they are
> effectively from a different name space.

goodbye editing with a simple editor... of course you would also like to 
introduce the possibility to write from the right to left and vertical.

i can see your good intention but i doubt that this leads to a better 
programming language.

chris

-- 
Chris <cliechti at gmx.net>