Long and interresting discussion with different point of view. Personnaly, even if the PEP goes (and its accepted), I'll continue to use identifiers as currently. But I understand those who wants to be able to use chars in their own language.
* for people which are not expert developers (non-pros, or in learning context), to be able to use names having meaning, and for pro developers wanting to give a clear domain specific meaning - mainly for languages non based on latin characters where the problem must be exacerbated. They can already use unicode in strings (including documentation ones). * for exchanging with other programing languages having such identifiers... when they are really used (I include binding of table/column names in relational dataabses). * (not read, but I think present) this will allow developers to lock the code so that it could not be easily taken/delocalized anywhere by anybody. In the discussion I've seen that problem of mixing chars having different unicode number but same representation (ex. omega) is resolved (use of an unicode attribute linked to representation AFAIU). I've seen (on fclp) post about speed, it should be verified, I'm not sure we will loose speed with unicode identifiers. On the unicode editing, we have in 2007 enough correct editors supporting unicode (I configure my Windows/Linux editors to use utf-8 by default). I join concern in possibility to read code from a project which may use such identifiers (i dont read cyrillic, neither kanji or hindi) but, this will just give freedom to users. This can be a pain for me in some case, but is this a valuable argument so to forbid this for other people which feel the need ? IMHO what we should have if the PEP goes on: * reworking on traceback to have a general option (like -T) to ensure tracebacks prints only pure ascii, to avoid encoding problem when displaying errors on terminals. * a possibility to specify for modules that they must *define* only ascii-based names, like a from __futur__ import asciionly. To be able to enforce this policy in projects which request it. * and, as many wrote, enforce that standard Python libraries use only ascii identifiers. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
