PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Steve Holden]

Istvan Albert wrote:
> On May 17, 9:07 am, "Martin v. Löwis" <mar... at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> 
>> up. I interviewed about 20 programmers (none of them Python users), and
>> most took the position "I might not use it myself, but it surely
>> can't hurt having it, and there surely are people who would use it".
> 
> Typically when you ask people about esoteric features that seemingly
> don't affect them but might be useful to someone, the majority will
> say yes. Its simply common courtesy, its is not like they have to do
> anything.
> 
> At the same time it takes some mental effort to analyze and understand
> all the implications of a feature, and without taking that effort
> "something" will always beat "nothing".
> 
Indeed. For example, getattr() and friends now have to accept Unicode 
arguments, and presumably to canonicalize correctly to avoid errors, and 
treat equivalent Unicode and ASCII names as the same (question: if two 
strings compare equal, do they refer to the same name in a namespace?).

> After the first time that your programmer friends need fix a trivial
> bug in a piece of code that does not display correctly in the terminal
> I can assure you that their mellow acceptance will turn to something
> entirely different.
> 
And pretty quickly, too.  If anyone but Martin were the author of the 
PEP I'd have serious doubts, but if he thinks it's worth proposing 
there's at least a chance that it will eventually be implemented.

regards
  Steve
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