PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Paul Boddie]

On 16 May, 15:49, Carsten Haese <cars... at uniqsys.com> wrote:
>
> [*] And if you respond that they must know "some" English in the form of
> keywords and such, the answer is no, they need not. It is not hard for
> Europeans to learn to visually recognize a handful of simple Chinese
> characters without having to learn their pronunciation or even their
> actual meaning. By the same token, a Chinese person can easily learn to
> recognize "if", "while", "print" and so on visually as symbols, without
> having to learn anything beyond what those symbols do in a Python
> program.

I think this is a crucial point being made here. Taking a page from
the python.jp site, from which an example was posted elsewhere in the
discussion, we see a sprinkling of Latin-based identifiers much like a
number of other Japanese sites:

http://www.python.jp/Zope/pythondoc_jp/

I know hardly anything about the Japanese language and have heard only
anecdotal tales of English proficiency amongst Japanese speakers, but
is it really likely that readers of that page (particularly newcomers)
know the special pronunciation of "LaTeX" (or even most English
readers unfamiliar with that technology) and the derivation of that
name, that "Q" specifically means "question", that "HTML" specifically
means "Hypertext Markup Language", and so on? It seems to me that
modern Japanese culture and society is familiar with such "symbols"
without there being any convincing argument to suggest that this is
only the case because "they all must know English".

Consequently, Python's keywords and even the standard library can
exist with names being "just symbols" for many people. It would be
interesting to explore the notion of localised versions of the
library; the means of providing interoperability between programs and
library versions in different languages would be one of the many
challenges involved.

Paul