Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[François Pinard]

[Alex Martelli]

> François Pinard wrote:

> > If many people had experienced the pleasure of naming variables properly
> > for their national language while programming, I guess most of them would
> > be rather enthusiastic proponents on having this capability with Python,

> This one person has had this dubious "pleasure" and loathes the idea
> with a vengeance.

:-) :-) :-)

> The very *IDEA* of cutting off the huge majority of programmers in the
> world, who don't understand Italian, from being able to understand and
> work with my code, is utterly abhorrent to me.

Granted.  You are a public man, and are quite visible in public fields.

But people are not all alike!  I worked in many areas and teams in my life,
and wrote a lot of code in English when meant to be widely available.
At other times and circumstances, this just does not apply.  Besides, I
know and work with people doing humble jobs in close shops, some have done
this for a lot of years, and they are good, nice and intelligent people.
Many of these people like their own language, and find English to be a
constant suffering, that is, much, much more than in my own case.  Oh, being
prevented from writing French identifiers correctly always irritated me,
for dozens of years now: this is a mild, yet permanent irritation.  I keep
smiling and sleep at night, so don't worry :-).  Yet, I'm very sympathetic
to those I know who are far less comfortable in English than I am.

> Long live a world where ONE natural language (don't care which one: ONE,
> I can learn) opens to me the doors of the (programming) world.

If you feel happy in the Borg collective, I'm glad you are happy. :-)
Seriously, however, many of us do not aspire to assimilation, and would
like to think that resistance is not wholly futile.  When one lives a full
computer life in French, say, with no appetite for international visibility,
limitations coming from the English languages are fully artificial.

There are plenty of programs around here, I see many of them every week,
written with all French identifiers, yet full of orthographical mistakes,
because the limitations of ASCII.  These people are lost anyway for your
cause of ONE universal natural language.  Let's accept that the difference
exists.  I beg that for those people (me included), who do not spouse
the idea of English being universal, we consider that Python could be more
friendly, and not merely use the example of other programming languages as an
excuse for dismissing that there is a need.  Python has its own distinctive
marks and ideas, nicely supporting national local teams could be one more.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard