Allowing non-ASCII identifiers
Paul Prescod
paul at prescod.net
Fri Feb 13 15:03:28 EST 2004
Brian Quinlan wrote:
>>Have you ever seen real code like that?
>
> I've never seen any non-ASCII code in any language.
So other programming languages make non-ASCII characters possible but
English-speakers do not end up paying any price. So what's the problem?
Panic in the Python world strikes me as just FUD.
>>If not, what are you worried about? That C# programmers are reasonable
>>but Python programmers are devious and will go to extra effort to make
>>your life difficult?
>
>
> I don't think that there is any reasonable usage of syntax like that, so why
> have it in the language?
We are getting a little off track. Nobody really proposed to borrow C#'s
identifier syntax whole hog (i.e have a keyword-escaping mechanism). I
proposed to learn from C# and Java. They allow non-ASCII keywords and
nobody seems to be hurt by it.
As far as "reasonable usage" of non-English identifiers. Non-English
speakers tell me that this is reasonable and I trust them to understand
their situation better than I do!
But as an aside, the idea of allowing keywords to also be identifiers
(with appropriate escaping syntax) is not a bad ones.
Let's say you are calling an XML-RPC server that uses a method name that
happens to also be a Python keyword (e.g. "yield"). Of course your
XML-RPC API could have a specific way of working around this but knowing
the way the Python world works, it will use a different convention than
your COM API which will use a different convention than your SOAP API
which will use a different convention than your PyObjectiveC API, etc.
Why not have the language standardize?
Paul Prescod
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