On Jun 10, 2007, at 4:57 PM, Baptiste Carvello wrote: > >> Indeed. That was my primary motivation for the PEP: to make >> it easier for programmers to understand Python, and to allow >> people to write more transparent programs. > The real question is: transparent *to whom*. Transparent to the > developper > himself when he rereads his own code (which I value as a > developper), or > transparent to the user of the program when he tries to fix a bug > (which I value > as a user of open-source software) ? Non-ASCII identifiers are > marginally better > for the first case, but can be dramatically worse for the second > one. Clearly, > there is a tradeoff.
If another developer is planning to write code in English, this whole debate is moot. So, let's take as a given that he is going to write a program in his own non-English language. Now, will he write in a asciified form of his language, or using the proper character set? Right now, the only option is the first. The PEP proposes to also allow the second. So, your question should be: is it easier to understand an ASCIIified form of another language, or the actual language itself? For me (who doesn't speak said langauge, nor perhaps even know its character set), I'm pretty sure the answer is still going to be the second: I'd rather a program written in Chinese use Chinese characters, rather than a transliteration of Chinese into ASCII. because it is actually feasible for me to do automatic translation of Chinese into something resembling English. And of course, that's even more true when talking about a language like French, which uses an alphabet quite familiar to me, but yet online translators still fail to function if it's been transliterated into ASCII. James _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
