Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[Martin v. Löwis]

pinard at iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard) writes:

> There is a lot of in-house development, not meant to be exported, that
> would be _so_ much more comfortable if we could use our own language
> while programming.  

You can do that in comments. You cannot do that in the program, since
all keywords remain English-based.

> Many years ago, we experienced that university-wide, by modifying
> the Pascal compiler so we can use French identifiers whenever we
> feel like it (as well as a lot of other software and even hardware),
> and we kept modifying compilers while new Pascal versions were
> released.  Moving on to other sites and languages, my co-workers and
> I did not try redoing such patches all the time, everywhere.  Yet, I
> would deeply like that Python be on our side, and favourable at
> restoring our Lost Paradise.

Modifying the compiler so that it supports one language (with one
encoding) is one thing; modifying it that it supports arbitrary
languages (with arbitrary encodings) is a different problem; existing
code may break if you make this kind of extension.

So a "it would be nice" is not a strong-enough rationale for such a
change - "I really need to have it, and I accept to break other
people's code for getting it" would be, if enough people voiced that
position.

Regards,
Martin