PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Ross Ridge]

=?ISO-8859-15?Q?=22Martin_v=2E_L=F6wis=22?=  <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>One possible reason is that the tools processing the program would not
>know correctly what encoding the source file is in, and would fail
>when they guessed the encoding incorrectly. For comments, that is not
>a problem, as an incorrect encoding guess has no impact on the meaning
>of the program (if the compiler is able to read over the comment
>in the first place).

Possibly.  One Java program I remember had Japanese comments encoded
in Shift-JIS.  Will Python be better here?  Will it support the source
code encodings that programmers around the world expect?

>Another possible reason is that the programmers were unsure whether
>non-ASCII identifiers are allowed.

If that's the case, I'm not sure how you can improve on that in Python.

There are lots of possible reasons why all these programmers around
the world who want to use non-ASCII identifiers end-up not using them.
One is simply that very people ever really want to do so.  However,
if you're to assume that they do, then you should look the existing
practice in other languages to find out what they did right and what
they did wrong.  You don't have to speculate.

					Ross Ridge

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