PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Alexander Schmolck]

"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> writes:

> 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-3000 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 believe this PEP differs from other Py3k PEPs in that it really
> requires feedback from people with different cultural background
> to evaluate it fully - most other PEPs are culture-neutral.
>
> So, please provide feedback, e.g. perhaps by answering these
> questions:
> - should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? 

Yes.

> why?

Because not everyone speaks English, not all languages can losslessly
transliterated ASCII and because it's unreasonable to drastically restrict the
domain of things that can be conveniently expressed for a language that's also
targeted at a non-professional programmer audience.

I'm also not aware of any horror stories from languages which do already allow
unicode identifiers.

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

Possibly.

> in what cases?

Maybe mathematical code (greek letters) or code that is very culture and
domain specific (say code doing Japanese tax forms).

'as