PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Eric Brunel]

On Tue, 15 May 2007 11:25:50 +0200, Thorsten Kampe  
<thorsten at thorstenkampe.de> wrote:

> * Eric Brunel (Tue, 15 May 2007 10:52:21 +0200)
>> On Tue, 15 May 2007 09:38:38 +0200, Duncan Booth
>> <duncan.booth at invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> > Recently there has been quite a bit of publicity about the One Laptop  
>> Per
>> > Child project. The XO laptop is just beginning rollout to children and
>> > provides two main programming environments: Squeak and Python. It is  
>> an
>> > exciting thought that that soon there will be millions of children in
>> > countries such as Nigeria, Brazil, Uruguay or Nepal[*] who have the
>> > potential to learn to program, but tragic if the Python community is  
>> too
>> > arrogant to consider it acceptable to use anything but English and  
>> ASCII.
>>
>> You could say the same about Python standard library and keywords then.
>
> You're mixing apples and peaches: identifiers (variable names) are
> part of the user interface for the programmer and free to his
> diposition.

So what? Does it mean that it's acceptable for the standard library and  
keywords to be in English only, but the very same restriction on  
user-defined identifiers is out of the question? Why? If I can use my own  
language in my identifiers, why can't I write:

classe MaClasse:
   définir __init__(moi_même, maListe):
     moi_même.monDictionnaire = {}
     pour i dans maListe:
       moi_même.monDictionnaire[i] = Rien

For a French-speaking person, this is far more readable than:

class MaClasse:
   def __init__(self, maListe):
     self.monDictionnaire = {}
     for i in maListe:
       self.monDictionnaire[i] = None

Now, *this* is mixing apples and peaches... And this would look even  
weirder with a non-indo-european language...
-- 
python -c "print ''.join([chr(154 - ord(c)) for c in  
'U(17zX(%,5.zmz5(17l8(%,5.Z*(93-965$l7+-'])"