PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[René Fleschenberg]

Steven D'Aprano schrieb:
> 
>> A Python
>>       project that uses Urdu identifiers throughout is just as useless
>>       to me, from a code-exchange point of view, as one written in Perl.
> 
> That's because you can't read it, not because it uses Unicode. It could 
> be written entirely in ASCII, and still be unreadable and impossible to 
> understand.

That is a reason to actively encourage people to write their code in
English whereever possible, not one to allow non-ASCII identifiers,
which might even do the opposite.

>>     - Unicode is harder to work with than ASCII in ways that are more
>>     important
>>       in code than in human-language text. Humans eyes don't care if two
>>       visually indistinguishable characters are used interchangeably.
>>       Interpreters do. There is no doubt that people will accidentally
>>       introduce mistakes into their code because of this.
> 
> That's no different from typos in ASCII. There's no doubt that we'll give 
> the same answer we've always given for this problem: unit tests, pylint 
> and pychecker.

Maybe it is no different (actually, I think it is: With ASCII, at least
my terminal font can display all the identifiers in a traceback), but
why do you want to create *more* possibilities to do mistakes?

-- 
René