PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[André]

On May 13, 2:30 pm, John Nagle <n... at animats.com> wrote:
> Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> > PEP 1 specifies that PEP authors need to collect feedback from the
> > community. As the author of PEP 3131, I'd like to encourage comments
> > to the PEP included below, either here (comp.lang.python), or to
> > python-3... at python.org
>
> > In summary, this PEP proposes to allow non-ASCII letters as
> > identifiers in Python. If the PEP is accepted, the following
> > identifiers would also become valid as class, function, or
> > variable names: Löffelstiel, changé, ошибка, or 売り場
> > (hoping that the latter one means "counter").
> > All identifiers are converted into the normal form NFC while parsing;
> > comparison of identifiers is based on NFC.
>
>      That may not be restrictive enough, because it permits multiple
> different lexical representations of the same identifier in the same
> text.  Search and replace operations on source text might not find
> all instances of the same identifier.  Identifiers should be required
> to be written in source text with a unique source text representation,
> probably NFC, or be considered a syntax error.
>
>      I'd suggest restricting identifiers under the rules of UTS-39,
> profile 2, "Highly Restrictive".  This limits mixing of scripts
> in a single identifier; you can't mix Hebrew and ASCII, for example,
> which prevents problems with mixing right to left and left to right
> scripts.  Domain names have similar restrictions.
>
>                                 John Nagle

Python keywords MUST be in ASCII ... so the above restriction can't
work.  Unless the restriction is removed (which would be a separate
PEP).

André