[Python-3000] Support for PEP 3131

[James Y Knight]

On Jun 10, 2007, at 4:57 PM, Baptiste Carvello wrote:
>
>> Indeed. That was my primary motivation for the PEP: to make
>> it easier for programmers to understand Python, and to allow
>> people to write more transparent programs.
> The real question is: transparent *to whom*. Transparent to the  
> developper
> himself when he rereads his own code (which I value as a  
> developper), or
> transparent to the user of the program when he tries to fix a bug  
> (which I value
> as a user of open-source software) ? Non-ASCII identifiers are  
> marginally better
> for the first case, but can be dramatically worse for the second  
> one. Clearly,
> there is a tradeoff.

If another developer is planning to write code in English, this whole  
debate is moot. So, let's take as a given that he is going to write a  
program in his own non-English language. Now, will he write in a  
asciified form of his language, or using the proper character set?  
Right now, the only option is the first. The PEP proposes to also  
allow the second.

So, your question should be: is it easier to understand an ASCIIified  
form of another language, or the actual language itself? For me (who  
doesn't speak said langauge, nor perhaps even know its character  
set), I'm pretty sure the answer is still going to be the second: I'd  
rather a program written in Chinese use Chinese characters, rather  
than a transliteration of Chinese into ASCII. because it is actually  
feasible for me to do automatic translation of Chinese into something  
resembling English. And of course, that's even more true when talking  
about a language like French, which uses an alphabet quite familiar  
to me, but yet online translators still fail to function if it's been  
transliterated into ASCII.

James