PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

Christophe wrote:
> sjdevnull at yahoo.com a ecrit :
> > Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> >> I would find it useful to be able to use non-ASCII characters for heavily
> >> mathematical programs. There would be a closer correspondence between the
> >> code and the mathematical equations if one could write D(u*p) instead of
> >> delta(mu*pi).
> >
> > Just as one risk here:
> > When reading the above on Google groups, it showed up as "if one could
> > write ?(u*p)..."
> > When quoting it for response, it showed up as "could write D(u*p)".
> >
> > I'm sure that the symbol you used was neither a capital letter d nor a
> > question mark.
> >
> > Using identifiers that are so prone to corruption when posting in a
> > rather popular forum seems dangerous to me--and I'd guess that a lot
> > of source code highlighters, email lists, etc have similar problems.
> > I'd even be surprised if some programming tools didn't have similar
> > problems.
>
> So, it was google groups that continuously corrupted the good UTF-8
> posts by force converting them to ISO-8859-1?
>
> Of course, there's also the possibility that it is a problem on *your*
> side

Well, that's part of the point isn't it?  It seems incredibly naive to
me to think that you could use whatever symbol was intended and have
it show up, and the "well fix your machine!" argument doesn't fly.  A
lot of the time programmers have to look at stack traces on end-user's
machines (whatever they may be) to help debug.  They have to look at
code on the (GUI-less) production servers over a terminal link.  They
have to use all kinds of environments where they can't install the
latest and greatest fonts.  Promoting code that becomes very hard to
read and debug in real situations seems like a sound negative to me.