Python discussed in Nature

[John Ladasky]

On Thursday, February 12, 2015 at 3:08:10 AM UTC-8, Fabien wrote:

> ... what a coincidence then that a huge majority of scientists 
> (including me) dont care AT ALL about unicode. But since scientists are 
> not paid to rewrite old code, the scientific world is still stuck to 
> python 2.

I'm a scientist.  I'm a happy Python 3 user who migrated from Python 2 about two years ago.

And I use Unicode in my Python.  In implementing some mathematical models which have variables like delta, gamma, and theta, I decided that I didn't like the line lengths I was getting with such variable names.  I'm using δ, γ, and θ instead.  It works fine, at least on my Ubuntu Linux system (and what scientist doesn't use Linux?).  I also have special mathematical symbols, superscripted numbers, etc. in my program comments.  It's easier to read 2x³ + 3x² than 2*x**3 + 3*x**2.

I am teaching someone Python who is having a few problems with Unicode on his Windows 7 machine.  It would appear that Windows shipped with a less-than-complete Unicode font for its command shell.  But that's not Python's fault.