[Python-Dev] String substitution: compile-time versus runtime

[Michael McLay]

On Friday 12 July 2002 12:23 pm, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> (and perhaps about being able to use words in their own language as
> identifiers).

Beware of possible lookalike characters.  I recently learned that it is 
possible to register for domain name with Unicode characters and since there 
are indistinguishable character symbols on different code pages (for 
instance, the Cyrillic 'o' is indistinguishable from the English 'o') this 
has created an interesting opportunity for domain name exploits. It probably 
isn't dangerous in the Python source code, but limiting the character set of 
identifiers to a small number of characters seems prudent.