the meaning of rﾕ.......ï¾

[Henrik Faber]

On 23.07.2012 15:35, Chris Angelico wrote:

> That said, though, there's good argument in allowing full Unicode in
> *identifiers*. If I'm allowed to name something "foo", then a German
> should be allowed to name something "foö". And since identifiers are
> case sensitive (at least, they are in all good languages...), there
> should be no issues with not having particular letters.

To you have a "ö" key on your keyboard? I have one. It wouldn't be a
problem for me. Most English layouts probably don't. It would be annoying.

If you allow for UTF-8 identifiers you'll have to be horribly careful
what to include and what to exclude. Is the non-breaking space a valid
character for a identifier? Technically it's a different character than
the normal space, so why shouldn't it be? What an awesome idea!

What about × vs x? Or Ì vs Í vs Î vs Ï vs Ĩ vs Ī vs ī vs Ĭ vs ĭ vs Į vs
į vs I vs İ? Do you think if you need to maintain such code you'll
immediately know the difference between the 13 (!) different "I"s I just
happened to pull out randomly you need to chose and how to get it? What
about Ȝ vs ȝ? Or Ȣ vs ȣ? Or ȸ vs ȹ? Or d vs Ԁ vs ԁ vs ԃ vs Ԃ? Or ց vs g?
Or ս vs u?

I've not even mentioned the different punctuation marks and already it's
hell of a mess, although I just happened to look into a few pages.
Having UTF-8 in identifiers is a horrible idea. It makes perfect sense
to support it within strings (as Python3 does), but I would hate for
Python to include them into identifiers. Then again, I'm pretty sure
this is not planned anytime soon.

Best regards,
Henrik