Allowing non-ASCII identifiers

[John Roth]

"Paul Prescod" <paul at prescod.net> wrote in message
news:mailman.1391.1076369629.12720.python-list at python.org...
Martin v. Löwis wrote:

> Paul Prescod wrote:
>
>> 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?)
>
>
> I doubt that it would matter much to those currently opposed; I know
> that *I* would be opposed to such a strategy: Allowing arbitrary source
> code encoding is no technical challenge whatsoever, and restricting
> it to single-byte encodings is an arbitrary restriction.

You are right. Re-reading Guido's complaint I understand what you mean.
But I have heard the argument in the past that Unicode source files
would break introspection tools. If that isn't a concern this time
around then disregard my suggestion.

[JR]
I believe that unicode (actually UTF-8) source code files
are legitimate if you declare them properly in the encoding
line. In fact, UTF-8 is the example in the documentation.

I'm all in favor of going to unicode all the way. I'd like to
have the proper mathematical symbols for logical and set
operations, as well as integer divide. They're all there in the
unicode character set, after all; why should we have to
settle for archaic character restrictions?

John Roth
[/JR]

  Paul Prescod