PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Alan Franzoni]

Il Sun, 13 May 2007 17:44:39 +0200, "Martin v. Löwis" ha scritto:

[cut]

I'm from Italy, and I can say that some thoughts by Martin v. Löwis are
quite right. It's pretty easy to see code that uses "English" identifiers
and comments, but they're not really english - many times, they're just
"englishized" versions of the italian word. They might lure a real english
reader into an error rather than help him understand what the name really
stands for. It would be better to let the programmer pick the language he
or she prefers, without restrictions.

The patch problem doesn't seem a real issue to me, because it's the project
admin the one who can pick the encoding, and he could easily refuse any
patch that doesn't conform to the standards he wants.

BTW, there're a couple of issues that should be solved; even though I could
do with iso-8859-1, I usually pick utf-8 as the preferred encoding for my
files, because I found it more portable and more compatible with different
editors and IDE (I don't know if I just found some bugs in some specific
software, but I had problems with accented characters when switching
environment from Win to Linux, especially when reading/writing to and from
non-native FS, e.g. reading files from a ntfs disk from linux, or reading
an ext2 volume from Windows) on various platforms.

By the way, I would highly dislike anybody submitting a patch that contains
identifiers other than ASCII or iso-8859-1. Hence, I think there should be
a way, a kind of directive or sth. like that, to constrain the identifiers
charset to a 'subset' of the 'global' one.

Also, there should be a way to convert source files in any 'exotic'
encoding to a pseudo-intellegibile encoding for any reader, a kind of
translittering (is that a proper english word) system out-of-the-box, not
requiring any other tool that's not included in the Python distro. This
will let people to retain their usual working environments even though
they're dealing with source code with identifiers in a really different
charset.

-- 
Alan Franzoni <alan.franzoni.xyz at gmail.com>
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