Alexander Schmolck napisał(a): >>> So, please provide feedback, e.g. perhaps by answering these >>> questions: >>> - should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? why? >> No, because "programs must be written for people to read, and only >> incidentally for machines to execute". Using anything other than "lowest >> common denominator" (ASCII) will restrict accessibility of code. This is >> not a literature, that requires qualified translators to get the text >> from Hindi (or Persian, or Chinese, or Georgian, or...) to Polish. >> >> While I can read the code with Hebrew, Russian or Greek names >> transliterated to ASCII, I would not be able to read such code in native. > > Who or what would force you to? Do you currently have to deal with hebrew, > russian or greek names transliterated into ASCII? I don't and I suspect this > whole panic about everyone suddenly having to deal with code written in kanji, > klingon and hieroglyphs etc. is unfounded -- such code would drastically > reduce its own "fitness" (much more so than the ASCII-transliterated chinese, > hebrew and greek code I never seem to come across), so I think the chances > that it will be thrust upon you (or anyone else in this thread) are minuscule.
I often must read code written by people using some kind of cyrillic (Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians). "Native" names transliterated to ascii are usual artifacts and I don't mind it. > BTW, I'm not sure if you don't underestimate your own intellectual faculties > if you think couldn't cope with greek or russian characters. On the other hand > I wonder if you don't overestimate your ability to reasonably deal with code > written in a completely foreign language, as long as its ASCII -- for anything > of nontrivial length, surely doing anything with such code would already be > orders of magnitude harder? While I don't have problems with some of non-latin character sets, such as greek and cyrillic (I was attending school in time when learning Russian was obligatory in Poland and later I learned Greek), there are a plenty I wouldn't be able to read, such as Hebrew, Arabic or Persian. -- Jarek Zgoda "We read Knuth so you don't have to." -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
