[Python-ideas] Non-ASCII in Python syntax? [was: Null coalescing operator]

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 12:19 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
> Uh, as far as I can tell from that page, Perl has absolutely nothing
> to do with that.  You enter the Unicode code point as hex, and if the
> font supports, you get the character.  What Paul is arguing is that
> entering any character, non-ASCII or ASCII, as a hex code point or as
> an Alt+digits sequence, is a non-starter for our audience.  Much as
> I'd like to disagree, I can't.

Back when I used a single codepage (IBM OEM, now called 437) and 256
characters, it wasn't unreasonable to memorize the alt-codes for most
of those characters. I could do all the single-line and double-line
characters from memory (might take me a couple of tries to get the
right corner), and if I needed to mix line types, I could just look
those up. But with all of Unicode? Totally impractical. You can't
expect people to use the hex codes.

ChrisA