PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Carsten Haese]

On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 08:54 -0400, Ross Ridge wrote:
> <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> >So, please provide feedback, e.g. perhaps by answering these
> >questions:
> >- should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? why?
> 
> I think the biggest argument against this PEP is how little similar
> features are used in other languages

That observation is biased by your limited sample. You only see open
source code that chooses to restrict itself to ASCII and mostly English
identifiers to allow for easier code sharing. There could be millions of
kids in China learning C# in native Mandarin and you'd never know about
it.

>  and how poorly they are supported
> by third party utilities.  Your PEP gives very little thought to how
> the change would affect the standard Python library.  Are non-ASCII
> identifiers going to be poorly supported in Python's own library and
> utilities?

How would a choice of identifiers interact in any way with Python's
standard or third-party libraries? The only things that get passed
between an application and the libraries are objects that neither know
nor care what identifiers, if any, are attached to them.

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