[Python-ideas] Truly international Python

[Carl M. Johnson]

This has been discussed before. A couple points:

- Chinese Python already exists (existed), see
http://www.chinesepython.org/cgi_bin/cgb.cgi/english/english.html but it
looks like the project has been dead for several years. Why? Because no one
really wants a completely localized Python

- The consensus seems to be that while it is a good idea to translate the
docstrings/Python docs, there's no point in translating keywords or module
names. For one thing, if you ever want to use an outside module, there's
going to have be some way of saying that the chrono module = the time
module. As a programmer, you can't get away with not knowing that when
things go wrong. For another thing, what happens if in english.py I have a
variable named "por" and in spanish.py I have a variable named "for"? How
can these modules work together?

- The comment that tends to come up in these threads is that "non-native
English speakers are going to have to learn 'a new language' anyway, so
what's the difference between learning to map a word in their own language
to a Python concept to learning to map an arbitrary English word to a Python
concept. In either case, it doesn't make any sense to write, "for the sake
of justice:" in English or "正義のために" in Japanese. Python's "for" is not the
English "for." It's its own thing. It means "process this iterator in a
loop." That's different from the English "for" and it's going to be
different from any existing word in any other language either.

- That said, letting people use unicode variable names is basically a good
idea and has already been implemented in Python 3 and can be turned on in
Python 2 with the right declarations.

Hope that helps,

-- Carl Johnson
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