Carsten Haese schrieb: > Allowing people to use identifiers in their native language would > definitely be an advantage for people from such cultures. That's the use > case for this PEP. It's easy for Euro-centric people to say "just suck > it up and use ASCII", but the same people would probably starve to death > if they were suddenly teleported from Somewhere In Europe to rural China > which is so unimaginably different from what they know that it might > just as well be a different planet. "Learn English and use ASCII" is not > generally feasible advice in such cultures.
This is a very weak argument, IMHO. How do you want to use Python without learning at least enough English to grasp a somewhat decent understanding of the standard library? Let's face it: To do any "real" programming, you need to know at least some English today, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. And it is definitely not going to be changed by allowing non-ASCII identifiers. I must say that the argument about domain-specific terms that programmers don't know how to translate into English does hold some merit (although it does not really convince me, either -- are these cases really so common that you cannot feasibly use a transliteration?). But having, for example, things like open() from the stdlib in your code and then öffnen() as a name for functions/methods written by yourself is just plain silly. It makes the code inconsistent and ugly without significantly improving the readability for someone who speaks German but not English. -- René -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
