[Python-3000] Support for PEP 3131

[Collin Winter]

On 5/14/07, Jason Orendorff <jason.orendorff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/13/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> > I don't think this scenario is all that unlikely. A
> > program is initially written by a Russian programmer
> > who uses his own version of "a" as a variable name.
> > Later an English-speaking programmer makes some
> > changes, and uses an ascii "a". Now there are two
> > subtly different variables called "a" in different
> > parts of the program.
>
> Greg,
>
> If this scenario were *not* unlikely, it would have happened
> to a Java programmer somewhere, right?  Has this *ever*
> happened?  I wasn't able to find a case.

Well, it's not exactly the kind of thing that makes for a riveting blog post.

This is something the Perl 6 people debated for months on end when
deciding whether to support Unicode identifiers. They eventually came
to the conclusion that if your editor doesn't flag this kind of thing,
it's a bug in the editor. I don't know of any editors that actually do
this, but there you go.

Of course, one of the main motivations for including Unicode support
in Perl 6 was that they were running out of "meaningful" ASCII
punctuation combinations and were looking to things like the »+«
operator and the ¥ operator for their salvation. Thankfully Python
doesn't have this problem.

Collin Winter