PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Sion Arrowsmith]

Stefan Behnel  <stefan.behnel-n05pAM at web.de> wrote:
>I don't think all identifiers in the stdlib are
>a) well chosen
>b) correct English words

Never mind the standard library, by my count about 20% of keywords
and builtins (excluding exception types) are either not correct
English words ('elif', 'chr') or have some kind of mismatch between
their meaning and the usual English usage ('hex', 'intern').

The discussion on readability and natural language identifiers reminds
me of my first job in programming: looking after a pile of Fortran77
from the mid-80s. Case-insensitive, with different coders having
different preferences (sometimes within the same module), and using
more than four characters on an identifier considered shocking. Of
course you got identifiers which were unintelligable, and it wasn't
a great situation, but we coped and the whole thing didn't fall over
in a complete heap.

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