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

[Richard Damon]

On 11/24/17 4:04 PM, Mikhail V wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 24, 2017 at 9:08 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 7:00 AM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I agree that one should have more choices, but
>>> people still can't really choose many things.
>>> I can't choose hyphen, I can't choose minus sign,
>>> and many tech people would probably want more operators.
>>> It counts probably not so *big* amount of people, compared to *all*
>>> people that potentially would say "oh how wonderful is it to be able
>>> to write in various scripts", still it is just a "use it at your own risk"
>>> thing at a minimum, and merely based on emotions rather than
>>> common sense.
>>>
>>> Regardless of what Unicode decides for classifications, there simply must
>>> be careful analysis how the major *Python* code actually looks in the end
>>> of all experiments. Especially true for characters in regard
>>> identifiers versus operators.
>> And it's the "identifiers versus operators" question that is why you
>> can't use hyphen in an identifier. Underscore is available as an ASCII
>> joiner, and there are various non-ASCII joiners available too. Why is
>> hyphen so important?
> Yes I understand this, so it is how Unicode defines joiners.
> Yeah, debates about the classifications can be
> hold forever, but one should not forget about the hyphen during
> these debates. Hyphen is used I think more then six hundreds
> years as a joiner (or probably some other classification term one prefer).
> And just comes so it works very well.
> Among Unicode joiners, middledot reminds of hyphen,
> but it is not used in typography for this task. So it is not good option
> and has issues in most fonts (too small or not aligned with lowercase).
> Often it is used to show up whitespace in editors,
> so it is kind of 'reserved'.
> Other joiners in unicode classification - well probably ok for a 1st April
> proposal.
>
> About importance, it was already covered in the proposal.
> Why it is SO important? It is rhetorical question.
> Important compared to what? Compared to the question, what
> one will eat and where sleep tomorrow? Then it is not so important.
>
>
> Mikhail

Have you tried using U+2010 (HYPHEN) ‐. It is in the class XID_CONTINUE 
(in fact it is in XID_START) so should be available.

What isn't available is U+002D (HYPHEN-MINUS) - because that is 
otherwise defined as the subtraction/negation operator.

It may make your code harder to read, if your font doesn't make enough 
of a distinction between those characters

-- 
Richard Damon