Benefits of unicode identifiers (was: Allow additional separator in identifiers)

[Thomas Jollans]

On 24/11/17 00:18, Richard Damon wrote:
> On 11/23/17 5:45 PM, Thomas Jollans wrote:
>> On 23/11/17 23:15, Richard Damon wrote:
>>> My thought is you define a legal only those Unicode characters that via
>>> the defined classification would be normally legal, but perhaps the
>>> first implementation doesn't diagnose many of the illegal combinations.
>>> If that isn't Pythonic, then yes, implementing a fuller classification
>>> would be needed. That might also say normalization questions would need
>>> to be decided too.
>>>
>> You do realise that Python has a perfectly good definition of what's
>> allowed in an identifier that is thoroughly grounded in the Unicode
>> standard and works very well, right?
>>
>>
>> -- Thomas
> 
> No, I wasn't aware that Python was already Unicode enabled in the source
> code set. Still fairly new with it, but the fact that people seemed to
> argue about doing it made me think it was allowed yet.
> 

It's an old favourite some people to shout about on slow news days...

Python allows identifiers to start with any letter or an underscore, and
continue with any letter or number, or an underscore. The details follow
the Unicode XID_* properties.

In comments and strings, anything goes.


-- Thomas