PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Alexander Schmolck]

Jarek Zgoda <jzgoda at o2.usun.pl> writes:

> Martin v. Löwis napisał(a):
>
>> So, please provide feedback, e.g. perhaps by answering these
>> questions:
>> - should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? why?
>
> No, because "programs must be written for people to read, and only
> incidentally for machines to execute". Using anything other than "lowest
> common denominator" (ASCII) will restrict accessibility of code. This is
> not a literature, that requires qualified translators to get the text
> from Hindi (or Persian, or Chinese, or Georgian, or...) to Polish.
>
> While I can read the code with Hebrew, Russian or Greek names
> transliterated to ASCII, I would not be able to read such code in native.

Who or what would force you to? Do you currently have to deal with hebrew,
russian or greek names transliterated into ASCII? I don't and I suspect this
whole panic about everyone suddenly having to deal with code written in kanji,
klingon and hieroglyphs etc. is unfounded -- such code would drastically
reduce its own "fitness" (much more so than the ASCII-transliterated chinese,
hebrew and greek code I never seem to come across), so I think the chances
that it will be thrust upon you (or anyone else in this thread) are minuscule.


Plenty of programming languages already support unicode identifiers, so if
there is any rational basis for this fear it shouldn't be hard to come up with
-- where is it?

'as

BTW, I'm not sure if you don't underestimate your own intellectual faculties
if you think couldn't cope with greek or russian characters. On the other hand
I wonder if you don't overestimate your ability to reasonably deal with code
written in a completely foreign language, as long as its ASCII -- for anything
of nontrivial length, surely doing anything with such code would already be
orders of magnitude harder?