PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Carsten Haese]

On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 03:49 -0700, HYRY wrote:
> > - should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? why?
> Yes. I want this for years. I am Chinese, and teaching some 12 years
> old children learning programming. The biggest problem is we cannot
> use Chinese words for the identifiers. As the program source becomes
> longer, they always lost their thought about the program logic.
> 
> English keywords and libraries is not the problem, because we only use
> about 30 - 50 of these words for teaching programming idea. They can
> remember these words in one week. But for the name of variable or
> function, it is difficult to remember all the English word. For
> example, when we are doing numbers, maybe these words: [odd, even,
> prime, minus ...], when we are programming for drawing: [line, circle,
> pixel, ...], when it's for GUI: [ button, event, menu...]. There are
> so many words that they cannot just remeber and use these words to
> explain there idea.

That is a good point, but I'd like to ask out of curiosity, at what age
do children generally learn pinyin? (Assuming you speak Mandarin. If
not, replace pinyin with the name of whatever phonetic transliteration
is common in your region.) Granted, pinyin shoehorned into ASCII loses
its tone marks, but the result would still be more mnemonic than an
English word that the student has to learn.

Regards,

-- 
Carsten Haese
http://informixdb.sourceforge.net