[Python-3000] PEP 3131 - the details

[James Y Knight]

On May 17, 2007, at 11:22 AM, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

>> While there has been a lot of discussion as to whether to accept PEP
>> 3131 as a whole, there has been little discussion as to the specific
>> details of the PEP. In particular, is it generally agreed that the
>> Unicode character classes listed in the PEP are the ones we want to
>> include in identifiers? My preference is to be conservative in  
>> terms of
>> what's allowed.
>
> John Nagle suggested to consider UTR#39
> (http://unicode.org/reports/tr39/). I encourage anybody to help me
> understand what it says.

I think this is not something that is appropriate for Python. It  
looks fairly specific to implementing a centralized name registry  
(say: DNS).  Specifically, the backwards compatibility is not  
appropriate, as it doesn't guarantee that a name valid now will be  
valid in the future. They point out that that is okay for DNS, where  
the rules can be applied at name-registration time, and previously- 
registered names can continue to be used.

James