[Python-Dev] Shouldn't I be able to print Unicode objects?

[Fredrik Lundh]

Tim Peters wrote:> > Shouldn't we fix the tokenizer to explicitely check for 'a'...'z'
> > and 'A'...'Z' ?! (same for digits) ?!
> 
> That's certain to break code, and it's certain that some of those whose code
> gets broken would scream very loudly about it.

I don't get it.  If people use non-ascii characters, they're clearly not
using Python.  from the language reference:

        ...

    Python uses the 7-bit ASCII character set for program
    text and string literals. 

        ...

    Identifiers (also referred to as names) are described by
    the following lexical definitions:

        identifier:     (letter|"_") (letter|digit|"_")*
        letter:         lowercase | uppercase
        lowercase:      "a"..."z"
        uppercase:      "A"..."Z"
        digit:          "0"..."9"

    Identifiers are unlimited in length. Case is significant

        ...

either change the specification, and break every single tool written by
anyone who actually bothered to read the specification [1], or add a
warning to 2.2.

</F>

1) I assume the specification didn't exist when GvR wrote the first
CPython implementation ;-)