[Python-ideas] Proposal for default character representation

[Cory Benfield]

> On 14 Oct 2016, at 08:53, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> What keeps people from using same characters?
> I will tell you what - it is local law. If you go to school you *have* to
> write in what is prescribed by big daddy. If youre in europe or America, you are
> more lucky. And if you're in China you'll be punished if you
> want some freedom. So like it or not, learn hieroglyphs
> and become visually impaired in age of 18.

So you know, for the future, I think this comment is going to be the one that causes most of the people who were left to disengage with this discussion.

The many glyphs that exist for writing various human languages are not inefficiency to be optimised away. Further, I should note that most places to not legislate about what character sets are acceptable to transcribe their languages. Indeed, plenty of non-romance-language-speakers have found ways to transcribe their languages of choice into the limited 8-bit character sets that the Anglophone world propagated: take a look at Arabish for the best kind of example of this behaviour, where "الجو عامل ايه النهارده فى إسكندرية؟" will get rendered as "el gaw 3amel eh elnaharda f eskendereya?”

But I think you’re in a tiny minority of people who believe that all languages should be rendered in the same script. I can think of only two reasons to argue for this:

1. Dealing with lots of scripts is technologically tricky and it would be better if we didn’t bother. This is the anti-Unicode argument, and it’s a weak argument, though it has the advantage of being internally consistent.
2. There is some genuine harm caused by learning non-ASCII scripts.

Your paragraph suggest that you really believe that learning to write in Kanji (logographic system) as opposed to Katagana (alphabetic system with 48 non-punctuation characters) somehow leads to active harm (your phrase was “become visually impaired”). I’m afraid that you’re really going to need to provide one hell of a citation for that, because that’s quite an extraordinary claim.

Otherwise, I’m afraid I have to say お先に失礼します.

Cory