[Python-ideas] Non-ASCII in Python syntax? [was: Null coalescing operator]

[Nick Coghlan]

On 30 October 2016 at 23:39, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's certainly not difficult, in principle. I have (had, I lost it in
> an upgrade recently...) a little AutoHotkey program that interpreted
> Vim-style digraphs in any application that needed them. But my point
> was that we don't want to require people to write such custom
> utilities, just to be able to write Python code. Or is the feeling
> that it's acceptable to require that?

Getting folks used to the idea that they need to use the correct kinds
of quotes is already challenging :)

However, the main issue is the one I mentioned in PEP 531 regarding
the "THERE EXISTS" symbol: Python and other programming languages
re-use "+", "-", "=" etc because a lot of folks are already familiar
with them from learning basic arithmetic. Other symbols are used in
Python because they were inherited from C, or were relatively
straightforward puns on such previously inherited symbols.

What this means is that there aren't likely to be many practical gains
in using the "right" symbol for something, even when it's already
defined in Unicode, as we expect the number of people learning that
symbology *before* learning Python to be dramatically smaller than the
proportion learning Python first and the formal mathematical symbols
later (if they learn them at all).

This means that instead of placing more stringent requirements on
editing environments for Python source code in order to use non-ASCII
input symbols, we're still far more likely to look to define a
suitable keyword, or assign a relatively arbitrary meaning to an ASCII
punctuation symbol (and that's assuming we accept that a proposal will
see sufficient use to be worthy of new syntax in the first place,
which is far from being a given).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia