PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Duncan Booth]

"Eric Brunel" <eric.brunel at pragmadev.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 15 May 2007 09:38:38 +0200, Duncan Booth  
><duncan.booth at invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> Recently there has been quite a bit of publicity about the One Laptop
>> Per Child project. The XO laptop is just beginning rollout to
>> children and provides two main programming environments: Squeak and
>> Python. It is an exciting thought that that soon there will be
>> millions of children in countries such as Nigeria, Brazil, Uruguay or
>> Nepal[*] who have the potential to learn to program, but tragic if
>> the Python community is too arrogant to consider it acceptable to use
>> anything but English and ASCII. 
> 
> You could say the same about Python standard library and keywords
> then.  Shouldn't these also have to be translated? One can even push
> things a  little further: I don't know about the languages used in the
> countries you  mention, but for example, a simple construction like
> 'if <condition> <do  something>' will look weird to a Japanese (the
> Japanese language has a  "post-fix" feel: the equivalent of the 'if'
> is put after the condition).  So why enforce an English-like sentence
> structure? 
> 

Yes, non-English speakers have to learn a set of technical words which are 
superficially in English, but even English native speakers have to learn 
non-obvious meanings, or non-English words 'str', 'isalnum', 'ljust'.
That is an unavoidable barrier, but it is a limited vocabulary and a 
limited set of syntax rules. What I'm trying to say is that we shouldn't 
raise the entry bar any higher than it has to be.

The languages BTW in the countries I mentioned are: in Nigeria all school 
children must study both their indigenous language and English, Brazil and 
Uruguay use Spanish and Nepali is the official language of Nepal.