PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[John Nagle]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> Neil Hodgson <nyamatongwe+thunder at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>>>>Plenty of programming languages already support unicode identifiers,
>>>
>>>Could you name a few?  Thanks.
>>
>>    C#, Java, Ecmascript, Visual Basic.
> 
> 
> Java (and C#?) have mandatory declarations so homoglyphic identifiers aren't
> nearly as bad a problem.  Ecmascript is a horrible bug-prone language and
> we want Python to move away from resembling it, not towards it.  VB: well,
> same as Ecmascript, I guess.

    That's the first substantive objection I've seen.  In a language
without declarations, trouble is more likely.  Consider the maintenance
programmer who sees a variable name and retypes it elsewhere, not realizing
the glyphs are different even though they look the same.  In a language
with declarations, that generates a compile-time error.  In Python, it
doesn't.

				John Nagle