PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[René Fleschenberg]

Stefan Behnel schrieb:
> Ok, but then maybe that code just will not become Open Source. There's a
> million reasons code cannot be made Open Source, licensing being one, lack of
> resources being another, bad implementation and lack of documentation being
> important also.
> 
> But that won't change by keeping Unicode characters out of source code.

Allowing non-ASCII identifiers will not change existing hindrances for
code-sharing, but it might add a new one.

IMO, the burden of proof is on you. If this PEP has the potential to
introduce another hindrance for code-sharing, the supporters of this PEP
should be required to provide a "damn good reason" for doing so. So far,
you have failed to do that, in my opinion. All you have presented are
vague notions of rare and isolated use-cases.

> I'm only saying that this shouldn't be a language restriction, as there
> definitely *are* projects (I know some for my part) that can benefit from the
> clarity of native language identifiers (just like English speaking projects
> benefit from the English language). And yes, this includes spelling native
> language identifiers in the native way to make them easy to read and fast to
> grasp for those who maintain the code.

If a maintenance programmer does not understand enough English to be
able to easily cope with ASCII-only identifiers, he will have a problem
anyway, since it will be very hard to use the standard library, the
documentation, and so on.

--
René