Using non-ascii symbols

[Christoph Zwerschke]

On the page http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python3%2e0Suggestions
I noticed an interesting suggestion:

"These operators ≤ ≥ ≠ should be added to the language having the 
following meaning:

       <= >= !=

this should improve readibility (and make language more accessible to 
beginners).

This should be an evolution similar to the digraphe and trigraph 
(digramme et trigramme) from C and C++ languages."

How do people on this group feel about this suggestion?

The symbols above are not even latin-1, you need utf-8.

(There are not many usefuls symbols in latin-1. Maybe one could use × 
for cartesian products...)

And while they are better readable, they are not better typable (at 
least with most current editors).

Is this idea absurd or will one day our children think that restricting 
to 7-bit ascii was absurd?

Are there similar attempts in other languages? I can only think of APL, 
but that was a long time ago.

Once you open your mind for using non-ascii symbols, I'm sure one can 
find a bunch of useful applications. Variable names could be allowed to 
be non-ascii, as in XML. Think class names in Arabian... Or you could 
use Greek letters if you run out of one-letter variable names, just as 
Mathematicians do. Would this be desirable or rather a horror scenario? 
Opinions?

-- Christoph