PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Jochen Schulz]

* René Fleschenberg:
> Stefan Behnel schrieb:
>> 
>> [...] They are just tools. Even if you do not
>> understand English, they will not get in your way. You just learn them.
> 
> I claim that this is *completely unrealistic*. When learning Python, you
> *do* learn the actual meanings of English terms like "open",
> "exception", "if" and so on if you did not know them before.

This is certainly true for easy words like "open" and "in". But there
are a lot of counterexamples.

When learning something new, you always learn a lot of new concepts and
you get to know how they are called in this specific context. For
example, when you learn to program, you might stumble upon the idea of
"exceptions", which you can raise/throw and except/catch. But even if
you know how to use that concept and understand what it does, you do not
necessarily know the "usual" meaning of the word outside of your domain.

As far as I can tell, quite often these are the terms that even enter
the native language without any translation (even though there are
perfect translations for the words in their original meaning).  German
examples are "exceptions", "client" and "server", "mail", "hub" and
"switch", "web" and many, many more. Nobody who uses these terms has to
know their exact meaning in his native language as long as he speaks to
Germans or stays in the domain where he learned them.

I read a lot of English text every day but I am sometimes still
surprised to learn that a word I already knew has a meaning outside
of computing. "Hub" is a nice example for that. I was very surprised to
learn that even my bike has this. ;-)

J.
-- 
If I was Mark Chapman I would have shot John Lennon with a water pistol.
[Agree]   [Disagree]
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