[Python-3000] PEP: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Mike Klaas]

On 5/1/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>
> > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2006-April/001526.html
> >
> > where Guido states that he trusts me that it can be made to work,
> > and that "eventually" it needs to be supported.

+0

> He says "the tools aren't ready yet", which I take to
> mean that Python won't need to support it until all
> widely-used editors, email and news software, etc, etc,
> reliably support displaying and editing of all
> unicode characters. We're clearly a long way from
> that situation.

Couldn't the same argument be applied against non-ascii characters in
string literals?  It would be safest to enforce the use of \u escapes,
no?

It is certainly true that the use of non-ascii indentifiers will cause
the code to be unusable by _someone_ using _some_ set of tools.  This
is something that the user will be aware of (as all new users of
non-ascii have been in the past).  Tools won't change without bug
reports.

-Mike