Increasing the diversity of people who write Python (was: Benefits of unicode identifiers)

[Skip Montanaro]

> I find it it interesting that the primary reason to want to limit the
> character set to ASCII is people thinking that it would make it hard for
> *them* to read/use the code, but no thought about how much harder it makes
> it on the original author/team to write code that is easily understood by
> THEM.

I think you misunderstood my post. For that I apologize that I wasn't clear.

I was only pointing out that there is a ton of inertia based on the
long dominance of ASCII (and before that EBCDIC) and its downstream
effects on computer entry systems. I know that there are likely
semi-reasonable ways to enter accented characters on my keyboard, but
they are unknown to me, and will likely be different on the different
systems I use, so I've not bothered to learn any of them.

One thing which occurred to me as I was typing my earlier message, but
which I failed to include... I wonder if when you go to Dell (for
example) to configure a computer, you can easily specify a non-ASCII
keyboard for a machine destined for delivery to the US. Maybe it's
trivial, but maybe it's just enough more difficult (slows delivery,
costs a few bucks more, which of the alternatives should you choose?)
that people think, "Ah hell, might as well just go with the ASCII
keyboard."

I'm clearly in the old fart camp at this point. Perhaps American
software engineers half my age aren't afflicted by my career-long
biases.

Skip