[Python-Dev] Divorcing str and unicode (no more implicitconversions).

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Josiah" == Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> writes:

    Josiah> Indeed, they are similar, but_ different_ in my font as
    Josiah> well.  The trick is that the glyphs are not different in
    Josiah> the case of certain greek or cyrillic letters.  They don't
    Josiah> just /look/ similar they /are identical/.

But these problems are going to arise in _any_ multilingual context;
it's not at all specific to identifiers.  It's just that computers
lexing identifiers are kinda picky about those things compared to
humans.  I think you can reasonably classify it as a new breed of
typo, and develop UIs to deal with it in that way.

To handle cases where glyphs are (nearly) identical, UIs that visually
flag "foreign" characters, at least in contexts where cross-block
punning is unacceptable, will be developed, and users will learn to
pay attention to those flags.


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