Why asci-only symbols?

[Bengt Richter]

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 10:56:44 +0200, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Martin_v=2E_L=F6wis=22?= <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

>Mike Meyer wrote:
>> Out of random curiosity, is there a PEP/thread/? that explains why
>> Python symbols are restricted to 7-bit ascii?
>
>No PEP yet; I meant to write one for several years now.
>
>The principles would be
>- sources must use encoding declarations
>- valid identifiers would follow the Unicode consortium guidelines,
>   in particular: identifiers would be normalized in NFKC (I think),
>   adjusted in the ASCII range for backward compatibility (i.e.
>   not introducing any additional ASCII characters as legal identifier
>   characters)
>- __dict__ will contain Unicode keys
>- all objects should support Unicode getattr/setattr (potentially
>   raising AttributeError, of course)
>- open issue: what to do on the C API (perhaps nothing, perhaps
>   allowing UTF-8)

Perhaps string equivalence in keys will be treated like numeric equivalence?
I.e., a key/name representation is established by the initial key/name binding, but
values can be retrieved by "equivalent" key/names with different representations
like unicode vs ascii or latin-1 etc.?

Regards,
Bengt Richter