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

[Neil Hodgson]

Josiah Carlson:

> 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.

   I used to work on software written by Japanese and English speakers
at Fujitsu with most developers being Japanese. The rules were that
comments could be in Japanese but identifiers were only allowed to
contain ASCII characters. Most variable names were poorly chosen with
s, p, q, fla (boolean=flag) and flafla being popular. When I asked
some Japanese coders why they didn't use Japanese words expressed in
ASCII (Romaji), their response was that it was a really weird idea.

   This is anecdotal but it appears to me that transliterations are
not commonly used apart from learning languages and some minimal help
for foreigners such as including transliterated names on railway
station name boards.

   Neil