[Python-ideas] Allow additional separator character in variables

Stephen J. Turnbull turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp
Thu Nov 23 01:34:20 EST 2017


Nick Coghlan writes:

 > We're not going to start second-guessing the Unicode Consortium on this
 > point - human languages are complicated, and we don't have any special
 > insight on this point that they don't.

Agreed.  Python, however, is NOT a (natural) human language, and the
Unicode Consortium definition of conformance does NOT prohibit
subsetting appropriate to the purpose.  We DO know more than the
Unicode Consortium about Python.  For example, I suspect that your
catholic appetite for XID in identifiers does not apply to syntactic
keywords or names of builtins.

 > https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3131/#specification-of-language-changes
 > delegated this aspect of the language to them by way of the XID_Start and
 > the XID_Continue categories, and we're not going to change that.

 > The reference interpreter really isn't the place to experiment with
 > answering them - rather, they're more a question for opt-in code
 > analysis,

I agree about experimentation.  I'm not in a hurry, since I've only
seen IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE and full-width ASCII break Python programs once
or twice in the ten years I've been teaching my students to use it.

Steve



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