[Terry Reedy]
I think there are two human issues: language and alphabet (character set) used to transcribe the language.
[...] I can potentially read, understand, and even edit such code. For another example, if I read
for wa in konichi: ... konichi[wa] = <something>
I can recognize that the two occurences each of 'konichi' and 'wa' are the same [...] if they were in Japanese chars, for instance, matching names to names would be *much* harder.
Hello, Terry, and other Python developers. Some people "pronounce" in their head, and recognise the music :-). For them, phonetic rendering is a help. Others would not have much trouble recognising recurring images, even if they do not associate sounds with them. Japanese or Korean people used to write to me once in a while, and I was quickly recognising their names written with their own script, without a real need to look at the accompanying phonetic transcription. You know, when I read English words, I do not pronounce them correctly in my head. English people do not see the difficulty for a foreigner to get the proper pronunciation (not even speaking of tonic accents, which I surely have all wrong most of the times!). English looks especially difficult to me, phonetically-wise. French is my own language, and I worked for a while on automatic phonetic transcriptions, and despite French looks more "regular" than English on that topic, I know for having done that automatic transcription is a difficult exercise.
But I also know that I do not necessarily wish to learn a dozen more sets, nor would I wish such on everyone else.
Nobody is really asking you to do so. As long as my co-workers and I could read each other, we are happy. We do not have the need that our code be understandable or easy everywhere else, this is not a problem. And if Japanese Pythoneers use Kanji or Hiragana, and are happy with them, I would surely not come and consider their pleasure is not worth, merely because I would need some adaptation to handle their code. The game here is to be comfortable in contexts where work is not meant to be widely disseminated.
I would like to see such [Unicode-identifier version of Python] at least accompanied by transliteration programs (preferably two-way) using the most accepted transliteration scheme for each alphabet.
Such tools could be undoubtedly fun to have, but I suspect they would not really serve a strong need. When I read an English Python program, maybe that I would like a tool that will transliterate that English program into some phonetic alphabet so I can figure out how it should sound -- but this is a difficult and unnecessary challenge, deep down. I do not know Asian languages, yet people explained to me that the correspondence between pictogram and phonetics is far from being easy. The same pictogram could be used with different meanings and have different pronunciation. Even with the same meaning, the pronunciation could be very different, not only between regions, but also between countries (for example, Chinese and Japanese could figure out each other pictogram for many of them, but have absolutely no commonalty in pronunciation). The other way, from Hiragana to Kanji for Japanese, is also very difficult, because quite ambiguous as well. All this to say that best would be to let people be comfortable in their own language while using Python, without sketching difficult pre-requisites over the project, which do not buy us much in practice. In my previous works on internationalisation, one of the most recurrent problem I observed is people trying to solve others' problems, which they do not have themselves (they want to save the World![*]). A typical example would be that some people object to non-ASCII identifiers in Python, foreseeing the difficulties others might have to find proper editors for handling these sources. One can exhaust himself into such discussions. The proper attitude in such matters, in my opinion, is for one to concentrate on the technical problems related to Python implementation, yet without taking everything else on one's shoulders. If the job is well done enough, people will happily take care and adapt. -------------------- [*] (For trekkies:) They all have a little Wesley Crusher in them! :-) -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard