[Python-ideas] Visually confusable unicode characters in identifiers

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Mathias Panzenböck writes:

 > I still don't understand why unicode characters are allowed at all
 > in identifier names.

"Consenting adults."  'nuff said?

An anecdote.  Back when I was first learning Japanese, I maintained an
Emacs interface to EDICT, a free Japanese-English dictionary.  The
code was smart enough to parse morphosyntax (inflection of verbs and
adjectives) into dictionary forms, but I wasn't (and according to my
daughter, still am not<wink/>).  So I asked my tutor for help.

Although a total non-programmer, he was able to read the grammar
easily because the state names (identifiers for callable objects) were
written in Japanese, using the standard grammatical name for the
inflection.  The "easy" part comes in because although his English was
good, it wasn't good enough to disentangle Lisp gobbledygook from the
morphosyntax data had it been written in ASCII.  But he was able to
read and comment on the whole grammar in about half an hour because he
could just skip *all* the ASCII!