PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[John Roth]

On May 13, 9:44 am, "Martin v. Löwis" <mar... at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> PEP 1 specifies that PEP authors need to collect feedback from the
> community. As the author of PEP 3131, I'd like to encourage comments
> to the PEP included below, either here (comp.lang.python), or to
> python-3... at python.org
>
> In summary, this PEP proposes to allow non-ASCII letters as
> identifiers in Python. If the PEP is accepted, the following
> identifiers would also become valid as class, function, or
> variable names: Löffelstiel, changé, ошибка, or 売り場
> (hoping that the latter one means "counter").

I notice that Guido has approved it, so I'm looking at what it would
take to support it for Python FIT. The actual issue (for me) is
translating labels for cell columns (and similar) into Python
identifiers. After looking at the firestorm, I've come to the
conclusion that the old methods need to be retained not only for
backwards compatability but also for people who want to translate
existing fixtures.

The guidelines in PEP 3131 for standard library code appear to be
adequate for code that's going to be contributed to the community. I
will most likely emphasize those in my documentation.

Providing a method that would translate an arbitrary string into a
valid Python identifier would be helpful. It would be even more
helpful if it could provide a way of converting untranslatable
characters. However, I suspect that the translate (normalize?) routine
in the unicode module will do.

John Roth
Phthon FIT