PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[René Fleschenberg]

Thorsten Kampe schrieb:
> You could actually try by giving some arguments for your opinion. Your 
> rationale was "English only, please" because of "code sharing".

I thought this was pretty clear. The more people can easily read code,
the higher the probability that it will be useful for them and that they
can make it more useful for others.

>> That completely depends on how you look at code-sharing. My impression
>> always was that the Python community in general does regard code-sharing
>> as A Good Thing.
> 
> I don't think the "Python community" does that because for something 
> to be considered good it should actually be clear what it means. So 
> what actually is "Code sharing"?! Wikipedia seems to know this term 
> but in a slightly different meaning:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_sharing

I think we all know what "code" in the context of Python means. As for
"to share", I think that is pretty clear, also. It means that people
other than the original authors use, study and modify the code. FWIW, a
Google search for 'Python code-sharing' yields almost 30k results.

> If the "Python community" would think that "code sharing" (whatever 
> that means) is per se a good thing it would switch to spaces only 
> allowed (instead of tabs and spaces allowed). 

There is PEP 8 that encourages the use of spaces only. Personally, I
would not have much of a problem with tabs being banned for indentation.
Maybe the main reason why that is not actually done is compatibility
with legacy code -- I don't know.

> Actually it would 
> refrain from giving indentation and white space a syntactical meaning 
> because this undoubtedly makes "code sharing" (on web pages or through 
> news readers for instance) /a lot/ more difficult.

Where did anyone say that code-sharing is the only concern? I just think
that it is undoubtedly one among others. So for something that harms
this concern to be done, there should be substantial benefits in it. I
fail to see them with non-ASCII identifiers so far.

-- 
René