PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Thorsten Kampe]

* René Fleschenberg (Tue, 15 May 2007 15:34:26 +0200)
> Thorsten Kampe schrieb:
> > No, if you claim that something by itself is good and has to be 
> > encouraged then you are obliged to prove or give arguments for that.
> 
> That would be well outside the scope of this newsgroup, and if you
> cannot see the reaons for this yourself, I am afraid that I won't be
> able to convince you anyway.

You could actually try by giving some arguments for your opinion. Your 
rationale was "English only, please" because of "code sharing".
 
> > Exactly. So whether this PEP encourages or discourages code sharing 
> > (and I don't think it does either) has nothing to do with the value of 
> > this PEP.
> 
> That completely depends on how you look at code-sharing. My impression
> always was that the Python community in general does regard code-sharing
> as A Good Thing.

I don't think the "Python community" does that because for something 
to be considered good it should actually be clear what it means. So 
what actually is "Code sharing"?! Wikipedia seems to know this term 
but in a slightly different meaning:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_sharing

> It is not as if we were talking about forcing people to
> share code. Just about creating/keeping an environment that makes this
> easily possible and encourages it.

If the "Python community" would think that "code sharing" (whatever 
that means) is per se a good thing it would switch to spaces only 
allowed (instead of tabs and spaces allowed). Actually it would 
refrain from giving indentation and white space a syntactical meaning 
because this undoubtedly makes "code sharing" (on web pages or through 
news readers for instance) /a lot/ more difficult.

Thorsten