PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Jarek Zgoda]

Martin v. Löwis napisał(a):

> So, please provide feedback, e.g. perhaps by answering these
> questions:
> - should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? why?

No, because "programs must be written for people to read, and only
incidentally for machines to execute". Using anything other than "lowest
common denominator" (ASCII) will restrict accessibility of code. This is
not a literature, that requires qualified translators to get the text
from Hindi (or Persian, or Chinese, or Georgian, or...) to Polish.

While I can read the code with Hebrew, Russian or Greek names
transliterated to ASCII, I would not be able to read such code in native.

> For some languages, common transliteration systems exist (in particular,
> for the Latin-based writing systems).  For other languages, users have
> larger difficulties to use Latin to write their native words.

This is one of least disturbing difficulties when it comes to programming.

-- 
Jarek Zgoda
http://jpa.berlios.de/