PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Aldo Cortesi]

Thus spake "Martin v. Löwis" (martin at v.loewis.de):

> - should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? why?

No! I believe that:

    - The security implications have not been sufficiently explored. I don't
      want to be in a situation where I need to mechanically "clean" code (say,
      from a submitted patch) with a tool because I can't reliably verify it by
      eye.  We should learn from the plethora of Unicode-related security
      problems that have cropped up in the last few years. 
    - Non-ASCII identifiers would be a barrier to code exchange. If I know
      Python I should be able to easily read any piece of code written in it,
      regardless of the linguistic origin of the author. If PEP 3131 is
      accepted, this will no longer be the case. A Python project that uses
      Urdu identifiers throughout is just as useless to me, from a
      code-exchange point of view, as one written in Perl.
    - Unicode is harder to work with than ASCII in ways that are more important
      in code than in human-language text. Humans eyes don't care if two
      visually indistinguishable characters are used interchangeably.
      Interpreters do. There is no doubt that people will accidentally
      introduce mistakes into their code because of this.


> - would you use them if it was possible to do so? in what cases?

No.




Regards,



Aldo



-- 
Aldo Cortesi
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