PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Paul Boddie]

Gregor Horvath wrote:
> Paul Boddie schrieb:
>
> > Perhaps, but the treatment by your mail/news software plus the
> > delightful Google Groups of the original text (which seemed intact in
> > the original, although I don't have the fonts for the content) would
> > suggest that not just social or cultural issues would be involved.
>
> I do not see the point.
> If my editor or newsreader does display the text correctly or not is no
> difference for me, since I do not understand a word of it anyway. It's a
> meaningless stream of bits for me.

But if your editor doesn't even bother to preserve those bits
correctly, it makes a big difference. When ６자회담관련론조 becomes 6???????
because someone's tool did the equivalent of
unicode_obj.encode("iso-8859-1", "replace"), then the stream of bits
really does become meaningless. (We'll see if the former identifier
even resembles what I've just pasted later on, or whether it resembles
the latter.)

> It's save to assume that for people who are finding this meaningful
> their setup will display it correctly. Otherwise they could not work
> with their computer anyway.

Sure, it's all about "editor discipline" or "tool discipline" just as
I wrote. I'm in favour of the PEP, generally, but I worry about the
long explanations required when people find that their programs are
now ill-formed because someone made a quick edit in a bad editor.

Paul