PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[rurpy at yahoo.com]

On May 16, 9:04 am, "Eric Brunel" <see.signat... at no.spam> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 May 2007 16:29:27 +0200, Neil Hodgson  
>
> <nyamatongwe+thun... at gmail.com> wrote:
...snip...
> > 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.


What does this have to do with the adoption of PEP-3131?  Are you
saying that if non-english speakers are allowed to use non-english
identifiers in their code, that you will have to *write* code in a
language
you don't know using a script you don't know?

If you, for some extremely improbable reason *have* to modify the
code, then you will be cutting and pasting the existing variables.
If you are creating new variables, then given that you don't know
the language and have no idea what to name the variable, the
mechanics of entering it are the least of your problems.  Name
the new variable in ascii and leave it to a native speaker to fix
later.

If the aswer to that is, "see, non-english Python is bad", then
arguments
against *enforcing* english-only python are elsewhere in the thread
so I won't repeat here.