[Python-Dev] Re: PEP 263 - Defining Python Source Code Encodings

[Guido van Rossum]

>        Note that Python identifiers are restricted to the ASCII
>        subset of the encoding, and thus need no further conversion
>        after step 4.
> 
> Could identifiers be produced according to the usual syntax (letters or
> underscore, then letters, digits and underscore), but without going to
> ASCII first?
[...]
> We should try not missing the opportunity, if it happens to exist now.

To the contrary, I wish GNU readline didn't call setlocale().
Allowing non-ASCII identifiers may eventually happen, but there are
lots of reasons why it's a bad idea (such as source code portability),
and tying such a proposal to this PEP is definitely the wrong thing.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)