[Python-ideas] Spelling of Assignment Expressions PEP 572 (was post #4)

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 4:58 AM, Thautwarm Zhao <yaoxiansamma at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Steve, I'm sorry to annoy you by my proposal, but I do think using
> unicode might be wise in current stage.
>
> \triangleq could be print with unicode number \u225c, and adding plugins to
> support typing this in editors could be easy, just simply map \xxx to the
> specific unicode char when we press the tab after typing it.
>
> People using Julia language are proud of it but I think it's just something
> convenient could be used in any other language.
>
> There are other reasons to support unicode but it's out of this topic.
>
> Although ':=' and '->' are not perfect, in the range of ASCII it seems to be
> impossible to find a better one.
>

If you want to introduce non-ASCII tokens to Python, start by adding
them as _alternatives_ to the current syntax. See whether people adopt
them. I've seen one or two people using editors that redisplay
ASCII-only source code using other symbols (eg ≡ for JavaScript's
===), and you could make it so the source code can actually be saved
in that form. But making it so that the ONLY way to use a feature is
to use a non-ASCII character? That's going to break a lot of people's
workflows.

ChrisA