PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Eric Brunel]

On Wed, 16 May 2007 16:29:27 +0200, Neil Hodgson  
<nyamatongwe+thunder at gmail.com> wrote:

> Eric Brunel:
>
>> Have you ever tried to enter anything more than 2 or 3 characters like  
>> that?
>
>     No, only for examples. Lengthy texts are either already available  
> digitally or are entered by someone skilled in the language.
>
>  > I did. It just takes ages. Come on: are you really serious about
>> entering *identifiers* in a *program* this way?
>
>     Are you really serious about entry of identifiers in another  
> language  being a problem?

Yes.

>     Most of the time your identifiers will be available by selection  
> from an autocompletion list or through cut and paste.

Auto-completion lists have always caused me more disturbance than help.  
Since - AFAIK - you have to type some characters before they can be of any  
help, I don't think they can help much here. I also did have to copy/paste  
identifiers to program (because of a broken keyboard, IIRC), and found it  
extremely difficult to handle. Constant movements to get every identifier  
- either by keyboard or with the mouse - are not only unnecessary, but  
also completely breaks my concentration. Programming this way takes me 4  
or 5 times longer than being able to type characters directly.

> Less commonly, you'll know what they sound like.

Highly improbable in the general context. If I stumble on a source code in  
Chinese, Russian or Hebrew, I wouldn't be able to figure out a single  
sound.

> Even more rarely you'll only have a printed document.

I wonder how that could be of any help.

> Each of these can be handled reasonably considering their frequency of  
> occurrence. I have never learned Japanese but have had to deal with  
> Japanese text at a couple of jobs and it isn't that big of a problem.  
> Its certainly not "virtually impossible" nor is there "absolutely no way  
> of entering the word" (売り場). I think you should moderate your  
> exaggerations.

I do admit it was a bit exaggerated: there actually are ways. You know it,  
and I know it. But what about the average guy, not knowing anything about  
Japanese, kanji, radicals and stroke counts? How will he manage to enter  
these funny-looking characters, perhaps not even knowing it's Japanese?  
And does he have to learn a new input method each time he stumbles across  
identifiers written in a character set he doesn't know? And even if he  
finds a way, the chances are that it will be terribly inefficient. Having  
to pay attention on how you can type the things you want is a really big  
problem when it comes to programming: you have a lot of other things to  
think about.
-- 
python -c "print ''.join([chr(154 - ord(c)) for c in  
'U(17zX(%,5.zmz5(17l8(%,5.Z*(93-965$l7+-'])"