PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Chris Cioffi evenprimes at gmail.com
Tue May 15 11:36:20 EDT 2007


+1 for the pep

There are plenty of ways projects can enforce ASCII only if they are
worried about "contamination" and since Python supports file encoding
anyway, this seems like a fairly minor change.

pre-commit scripts can keep weird encoding out of existing projects
and everything else can be based on per-project agreed on standards.

For those who complain that they can't read the weird characters, for
any reason, maybe you aren't meant to read that stuff?

There may be some fragmentation and duplication of effort (A Hindi
module X, a Mandarin module X and the English module X) but that seems
a small price to pay for letting Python fulfill it's purpose:  letting
people be expressive and get the job done.  People are usually more
expressive in their native languages, and thinking  in different
languages may even expose alternative ways of doing things to the
greater Python community.

Chris
-- 
"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only
a fool trusts either of them." -- P. J. O'Rourke



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