PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[René Fleschenberg]

rurpy at yahoo.com schrieb:
> I'm not sure how you conclude that no problem exists.
> - Meaningful identifiers are critical in creating good code.

I agree.

> - Non-english speakers can not create or understand
>   english identifiers hence can't create good code nor
>   easily grok existing code.

I agree that this is a problem, but please understand that is problem is
_not_ solved by allowing non-ASCII identifiers!

> Considering the vastly greater number of non-English
> spreakers in the world, who are not thus unable to use
> Python effectively, seems like a problem to me.

Yes, but this problem is not really addressed by the PEP. If you want to
do something about this:
1) Translate documentation.
2) Create a way to internationalize the standard library (and possibly
the language keywords, too). Ideally, create a general standardized way
to internationalize code, possibly similiar to how people
internationalize strings today.

When that is done, non-ASCII identifiers could become useful. But of
course, doing that might create a hog of other problems.

> That all programers know enough english to create and
> understand english identifiers is currently speculation or
> based on tiny personaly observed samples.

It is based on a look at the current Python environment. You do *at
least* have the problem that the standard library uses English names.
This assumes that there is documentation in the native language that is
good enough (i.e. almost as good as the official one), which I can tell
is not the case for German.

-- 
René