PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Stefan Behnel]

Eric Brunel wrote:
> You have a point here. When learning to program, or when programming for
> fun without any intention to do something serious, it may be better to
> have a language supporting "native" characters in identifiers. My
> problem is: if you allow these, how can you prevent them from going
> public someday?

My personal take on this is: search-and-replace is easier if you used well
chosen identifiers. Which is easier if you used your native language for them,
which in turn is easier if you can use the proper spellings. So I don't see
this problem getting any worse compared to the case where you use a
transliteration or even badly chosen english-looking identifiers from a small
vocabulary that is foreign to you.

For example, how many German names for a counter variable could you come up
with? Or english names for a function that does domain specific stuff and that
was specified in your native language using natively named concepts? Are you
sure you always know the correct english translations?

I think native identifiers can help here. Using them will enable you to name
things just right and with sufficient variation to make a search-and-replace
with english words easier in case it ever really becomes a requirement.

Stefan