On 6/10/07, "Martin v. Löwis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Many of us value a *predictable* identifier character set. > > Whether "predictable" means ASCII only, or user-selectable, or > > restricted by default, I think we all agree in this sentiment:
> Indeed, PEP 3131 gives a predictable identifier character set. > Adding per-site options to change the set of allowable characters > makes it less predictable. Not in practice. Today, identifiers are drawn from [A-Za-z0-9], which is a fairly small set. Under the current PEP 3131 proposal, they will be drawn from a much larger set. There won't normally be many more letters actually used in any given program, but there will be many more that are possible (with very low probability). Unfortunately, some of these are visually identical. (Even with modified XID, they don't get rid of confusables; they unicode consortium is very unwilling to rule out anything which might theoretically be needed for valid reasons.) Many more are visually indistinguishable in practice, simply because the reader hasn't seen them before. While Unicode is still a finite set, it is much larger than ASCII. By allowing site modifications, the rule becomes: It will use ASCII. Local code can also use local characters. There are potential exceptions for code that gets shared beyond local groups without ASCII-fication, but this is a strict subset of the "unreadable" code used under "anything-goes". Distribution without ASCIIfication is discouraged (by the extra decision required at installation time), users have explicit notice (by accepting it at install time), and the expanded charset is still a tiny fraction of what PEP3131 currently proposes (you can accept French characters withough accepting Chinese ideographs). -jJ _______________________________________________ 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
