PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Grant Edwards]

On 2007-05-14, Stefan Behnel <stefan.behnel-n05pAM at web.de> wrote:
> Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch schrieb:
>> In <mn.74c37d75c02f9f3d.34209 at mclaveauPas.De.Spam.com>, Michel Claveau
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> And  Il1 O0 ?
>> 
>> Hm, we should ban digits from identifier names.  :-)
>
> Ah, good idea - and capital letters also. After all, they are
> rare enough in English to just plain ignore their existance.

And I don't really see any need for using more than two
characters.  With just two letters (ignoring case, of course),
you can create 676 identifiers in any namespace.  That's
certainly got to be enough.  If not, adding a special caracter
suffix (e.g. $,%,#) to denote the data type should sufficient
expand the namespace.

So, let's just silently ignore anything past the first two.
That way we'd be compatible with Commodor PET Basic.

[You don't want to know how long it took me to find all of the
name-collision bugs after porting a basic program from a CP/M
system which had a fairly sophisticated Basic compiler (no line
numbers, all the normal structured programming flow control
constructs) to a Commodore PET which had a really crappy BASIC
interpreter.]

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! Am I having fun yet?
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