PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Carsten Haese]

On Wed, 16 May 2007 09:12:40 +0200, René Fleschenberg wrote
> The X people who speak "no English" and program in Python. I 
> think X actually is very low (close to zero), because programming in 
> Python virtually does require you to know some English, wether you 
> can use non-ASCII characters in identifiers or not. It is naive to 
> believe that you can program in Python without understanding any 
> English once you can use your native characters in identifiers. That 
> will not happen. Please understand that: You basically *must* know 
> some English to program in Python, and the reason for that is not 
> that you cannot use non-ASCII identifiers.

There is evidence against your assertions that knowing some English is a
prerequisite for programming in Python and that people won't use non-ASCII
identifiers if they could. Go read the posts by "HYRY" on this thread, a
teacher from China, who teaches his students programming in Python, and they
don't know any English. They *do* use non-ASCII identifiers, and then they use
a cleanup script the teacher wrote to replace the identifiers with ASCII
identifiers so that they can actually run their programs. This disproves your
assertion on both counts.

-Carsten