Allowing non-ASCII identifiers (Fran?ois Pinard)

[Paul Prescod]

Doug Fort wrote:

> [François Pinard]
> <snip>
> 
>>Some English readers might not really imagine, but it is a constant
>>misery, having to mangle identifiers while documenting and thinking
>>in languages other than English, merely because the Python notion of
>>letter is limited to the English subset.  Granted, keywords and standard
>>library use English, this is Python, and this is not at stake here!
>>However, there is a good part of code in local (or in-house) programs
>>which is thought as our crafted code, and even the linguistic change is
>>useful (to us) for segregating between what comes from the language and
>>what comes from us.  The idea is extremely appealing of being able to
>>craft and polish our code (comments, strings, identifiers) to make it as

I wonder if the proposal would be more palatable if it were restricted 
to 8-bit encodings (what we used to call "code pages"). This is at least 
a first step in the right direction that would help westerners and could 
be made to work even if Python were compiled without Unicode support. 
(it is still possible to compile Python without Unicode isn't it?)

  Paul Prescod