Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[Martin v. Löwis]

pinard at iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard) writes:

> > what would be the advantage in preventing non-english-speaking people
> > from using python?
> 
> The only reason I ever heard is preventing people to write code that cannot
> be universally exported.

Indeed, the code ought to run regardless of environment
settings. These days, it doesn't have that much to do with "exporting"
it: even in a single organization, multiple encodings for a single
language are used (e.g. in Germany, all of Latin-1, Latin-9, UTF-8,
and CP-1252 are common); people would expect that their code continues
to work when they move it from a Unix machine to a Windows machine.

So in the end, the only acceptable strategy would be to allow
identifiers that contain letters (or letterlike symbols) in arbitrary
languages. For Python, that would mean that attributes must be Unicode
objects, which could cause code breakage.

Regards,
Martin