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

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Greg Ewing wrote:
> I still think this is a much worse potential problem
> than that of "l" vs "1", etc. It's reasonable to
> adopt the practice of never using "l" as a single
> letter identifier, for example. But it would be
> unreasonable to ban the use of "E" as an identifier
> on the grounds that someone somewhere might confuse
> it with a capital epsilon.

As a style guide, people should use single-letter
identifiers only for local variables. If they follow
the guideline, it should be easy to tell whether
such an identifier is Latin or Greek (if everything
else in the function is Latin, the E likely is as
well).

> An alternative would be to identify such confusable
> letters in the various alphabets and define them
> to be equivalent.

pylint could check for such things (although I very
much doubt it would have any hits in the next 10
years).

> And beyond the issue of alphabets there's also the
> question of whether accented characters should be
> considered distinct. I can see quite a few holy
> flame wars erupting over that...

For that, there is the Unicode TR that precisely
defines how this should be done. People should then
have their wars with the Unicode consortium.

Regards,
Martin