PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Hendrik van Rooyen]

 "Bruno Desthuilliers" <bd....q...hose at free.que..rt.fr> wrote:

>Martin v. Löwis a écrit :
>> So, please provide feedback, e.g. perhaps by answering these
>> questions:
>> - should non-ASCII identifiers be supported?
>
>No.

Agreed - I also do not think it is a good idea

>
>> why?
>
>Because it will definitivly make code-sharing impossible. Live with it
>or else, but CS is english-speaking, period. I just can't understand
>code with spanish or german (two languages I have notions of)
>identifiers, so let's not talk about other alphabets...
>

The understanding aside, it seems to me that the maintenance nightmare is
more irritating, as you are faced with stuff you can't type on your
keyboard,  without resorting to look up tables and <alt> ... sequences.
And then you could still be wrong, as has been pointed out for capital
A and Greek alpha.

Then one should consider the effects of this on the whole issue of shared
open source python programs, as Bruno points out, before we argue that
I should not be "allowed" access to Greek, or French and German code
with umlauts and other diacritic marks, as someone else has done.

I think it is best to say nothing of Saint Cyril's script.

I think that to allow identifiers to be "native", while the rest of the
reserved words in the language remains ASCII English kind of
defeats the object of making the python language "language friendly".
It would need something like macros to enable the definition of
native language terms for things like "while", "for", "in", etc...

And we have been through the Macro thingy here, and the consensus
seemed to be that we don't want people to write their own dialects.

I think that the same arguments apply here.

>NB : I'm *not* a native english speaker, I do *not* live in an english
>speaking country, and my mother's language requires non-ascii encoding.
>And I don't have special sympathy for the USA. And yes, I do write my
>code - including comments - in english.
>

My case is similar, except that we are supposed to have eleven official
languages. - When my ancestors fought the English at Spion Kop*,
we could not even spell our names - and here I am defending the use of
this disease that masquerades as a language, in the interests of standardisation
of  communication and ease of sharing and maintenance.

BTW - Afrikaans also has stuff like umlauts - my keyboard cannot type them
and I rarely miss it, because most of my communication is done in English.

- Hendrik

* Spion Kop is one of the few battles in history that went contrary to the
common usage whereby both sides claim victory.  In this case, both sides
claimed defeat.  "We have suffered a small reverse..." - Sir Redvers Buller,
who was known afterwards as Sir Reverse Buller, or the Ferryman of the
Tugela.  To be fair, it was the first war with trenches in it, and nobody
knew how to handle them.