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

[Josiah Carlson]

"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> 
> M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> > You even argued against having non-ASCII identifiers:
> > 
> > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002-May/102936.html
> > 
> > Do you really think that it will help with code readability
> > if programmers are allowed to use native scripts for their
> > identifiers ?
> 
> Yes, I do - for some groups of users. Of course, code sharing
> would be more difficult, and there certainly should be a policy
> to use only ASCII in the standard library. But within local
> groups, users would find understanding code easier if they
> knew what the identifiers actually meant.

According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet),
various languages have adopted a transliteration of their language
and/or former alphabets into latin.  They don't purport to know all of
the reasons why, and I'm not going to speculate.

Whether or not more languages start using the latin alphabet is a good
question.  Basing judgement on history and likely globalization, it is
only a matter of time before basically all languages have a
transcription into the latin alphabet that is taught to all (unless
China takes over the world).

 - Josiah