Martin v. Löwis wrote: > M.-A. Lemburg wrote: > >>A few years ago we had a discussion about this on python-dev >>and agreed to stick with ASCII identifiers for Python. I still >>think that's the right way to go. > > I don't think there ever was such an agreement.
You even argued against having non-ASCII identifiers: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002-May/102936.html and I agree with you on most of the points you make in that posting: * Unicode identifiers are going to introduce massive code breakage - just think of all the tools people use to manipulate Python code today; I'm quite sure that most of it will fail in one way or another if you present it Unicode literals such as in "zähler += 1". * People don't seem very interested in using Unicode identifiers, e.g. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/i18n-sig/2001-February/000828.html most of the few who did comment, said they'd rather have ASCII identifiers, e.g. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002-May/104050.html Do you really think that it will help with code readability if programmers are allowed to use native scripts for their identifiers ? I think this goes beyond just visual aspects of being able to distinguish graphemes: If you are told to debug a program written by say a Japanese programmer using Japanese identifiers you are going to have a really hard time. Integrating such code into other applications will be even harder, since you'd be forced to use his Japanese class names in your application. This doesn't only introduce problems with being able to enter the Japanese identifiers, it will also cause your application to suddenly contain identifiers in Japanese even though that's not your native script. I think source code encodings provide an ideal way to have comments written in native scripts - and people use that a lot. However, keeping the program code itself in plain ASCII makes it far more readable and reusable across locales. Something that's important in this globalized world. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Oct 26 2005) >>> Python/Zope Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC.Zope.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ ::: Try mxODBC.Zope.DA for Windows,Linux,Solaris,FreeBSD for free ! :::: _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
