"Giovanni Bajo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On 01/05/2007 12.52, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
| Isn't this already blacklisted in PEP 3099? In today's Pep Parade post, he implies no. "PEP: Supporting Non-ASCII identifiers (Martin von Loewis) I'm on record as not liking this; my worry is that it will become a barrier to the free exchange of code. It's not just languages I can't read (Russian transliterated to the latin alphabet would be just as bad and we don't stop that now); many text editors have no or limited support for other scripts (not to mention mixing right-to-left script with Python's left-to-right identifiers). But if this receives a lot of popular support I'm willing to give it a try. The One Laptop Per Child project for example would like to enable students to code in their own language (of course they'd rather see the language keywords and standard library translated too...)." OLPC, which is one realization of Guido's CP4E dream (computer programming for everyone), changes the ball game (to use an American expression). I expect that most anyone with a college education from anywhere in the world has been exposed to latin characters and at least a few English words. But the case is different, I think, for elementary kids. Given that Guido has given the language and implementation freely and for free, I think it reasonable that he want to be able to read programs that recipients write. And 'foreign' words are much easier for him and many of us to read, match, and differentiate* when transliterated to Latin chars than when written in one of the ever proliferating character sets. (And I believe that Unicode is, sadly, encouraging the invention of unneeded new sets for obscure languages that would be much better off using one of the existing writing systems.) * To understand a program, one must be able to match all occurences of the same identifier and differentiate different identifiers. So, Martin, I suggest that you expand your proposal to include a transliteration mechanism and limit the allowed characters to those which can be translitered. I presume that this would be an expanding set. Once a mechanism is in place, people who want 'their' character set included can do the work needed for that set. Terry Jan Reedy
_______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
