PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Eric Brunel]

On Wed, 16 May 2007 12:22:01 +0200, Neil Hodgson  
<nyamatongwe+thunder at gmail.com> wrote:

> Eric Brunel:
>
>> ... there is no keyboard *on Earth* allowing to type *all* characters  
>> in the whole Unicode set.
>
>     My keyboard in conjunction with the operating system (US English  
> keyboard on a Windows XP system) allows me to type characters from any  
> language. I haven't learned how to type these all quickly but I can get  
> through a session of testing Japanese input by myself. Its a matter of  
> turning on different keyboard layouts through the "Text Services and  
> Input Languages" control panel. Then there are small windows called  
> Input Method Editors that provide a mapping from your input to the  
> target language. Other platforms provide similar services.

Funny you talk about Japanese, a language I'm a bit familiar with and for  
which I actually know some input methods. The thing is, these only work if  
you know the transcription to the latin alphabet of the word you want to  
type, which closely match its pronunciation. So if you don't know that 売り 
場 is pronounced "uriba" for example, you have absolutely no way of  
entering the word. Even if you could choose among a list of characters,  
are you aware that there are almost 2000 "basic" Chinese characters used  
in the Japanese language? And if I'm not mistaken, there are several tens  
of thousands characters in the Chinese language itself. This makes typing  
them virtually impossible if you don't know the language and/or have the  
correct keyboard.
-- 
python -c "print ''.join([chr(154 - ord(c)) for c in  
'U(17zX(%,5.zmz5(17l8(%,5.Z*(93-965$l7+-'])"