[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 263 - Defining Python Source Code Encodings

[François Pinard]

[Guido van Rossum]

> There's a full implementation for PEP 263.  Martin von Loewis is ready
> to commit it.  It's of course possible to let him do this and deal with
> the consequences once they're in CVS [...]

There is one thing which bothers me in the `Concepts' section:

       Note that Python identifiers are restricted to the ASCII
       subset of the encoding, and thus need no further conversion
       after step 4.

Could identifiers be produced according to the usual syntax (letters or
underscore, then letters, digits and underscore), but without going to
ASCII first?  The fact that I can now interactively (but not in batch) do:

---------------------------------------------------------------------->
12:24 0 pinard@titan:~ $ python
Python 2.2.1 (#1, Apr 29 2002, 14:27:21) 
[GCC 2.95.3 20010315 (SuSE)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> >>> >>> >>> >>> 
>>> élève = 3
>>> print élève
3
>>> 
----------------------------------------------------------------------<

surely let people dream.  Other members in our local development team are
even more excited than me about this!  They keep asking me if and when this
will become available for real, dependably, in Python! :-) They are eagerly
(and understandably) hoping to start spelling identifiers correctly.

We should try not missing the opportunity, if it happens to exist now.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard