PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch]

In <f2clj2$hdo$1 at rumours.uwaterloo.ca>, 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?
>  
> Ross Ridge wrote:
>> I think the biggest argument against this PEP is how little similar
>> features are used in other languages
> 
> Carsten Haese  <carsten at uniqsys.com> wrote:
>>That observation is biased by your limited sample.
> 
> No.  I've actually looked hard to find examples of source code that use
> non-ASCII identifiers.  While it's easy to find code where comments use
> non-ASCII characters, I was never able to find a non-made up example
> that used them in identifiers.

I think you have to search examples of ASCII sources with transliterated
identifiers too, because the authors may have skipped the transliteration
if they could have written the non-ASCII characters in the first place.

And then I dare to guess that much of that code is not open source.  One
example are macros in office programs like spreadsheets.  Often those are
written by semi professional programmers or even end users with
transliterated identifiers.  If the OpenOffice API wouldn't be so
"javaesque" this would be a good use case for code with non-ASCII
identifiers.

Ciao,
	Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch