Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[François Pinard]

[Martin v. Löwis]

> pinard at iro.umontreal.ca (François Pinard) writes:

> > There is a lot of in-house development, not meant to be exported, that
> > would be _so_ much more comfortable if we could use our own language
> > while programming.  

> You can do that in comments.  You cannot do that in the program, since
> all keywords remain English-based.

The suggestion of repeating code into comments is just not practical.

> Modifying the compiler so that it supports one language (with one encoding)
> is one thing; modifying it that it supports arbitrary languages (with
> arbitrary encodings) is a different problem; existing code may break if
> you make this kind of extension.

Existing code is not going to break, as long as English identifiers stay
a subset of nationally written identifiers.  Which is usually the case
for most character sets, Unicode among them, allowing ASCII letters as a
subset of all letters.

> So a "it would be nice" is not a strong-enough rationale for such a
> change - "I really need to have it, and I accept to break other
> people's code for getting it" would be, if enough people voiced that
> position.

A great deal of recent Python changes were to make it nicer in various ways.
None were strictly unavoidable, the proof being that Python 1.5.2 has been
successfully used for many things, and could still be.  We should not merely
vary the height of the "strong-enough rationale" bar depending on our own
tastes, as this merely gives a logical sounding to relatively pure emotions.

Having the capability of writing identifiers with national letters is
not going to break other people's code, this assertion looks a bit like
gratuitous FUD to me.  Unless you are referring to probable transient
implementation bugs which are normal part of any release cycle?  Python has
undergone changes which were much deeper and much more drastic than this
one would be, and the fear of transient bugs has not been a stopper.

If many people had experienced the pleasure of naming variables properly
for their national language while programming, I guess most of them would be
rather enthusiastic proponents on having this capability with Python, today.
As very few people experienced it, they can only imagine, without really
knowing, all the comfort that results.  Python is dynamic and interesting
enough, in my opinion, for opening and leading a worth trend in this area.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard