Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[John Roth]

"Oleg Broytmann" <phd at phd.pp.ru> wrote in message
news:mailman.1021095983.9957.python-list at python.org...
> On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 07:14:23PM -0400, John Roth wrote:
>
> > 4. All syntax words are preceeded by a special character, which
> > is not presented to the viewer by Python 3.0 aware tools. Instead,
> > the special character is used to pick them out and highlight them.
> > The reason for this is that the vocabulary of syntax words can then
> > be expanded without impacting existing programs - they are
> > effectively from a different name space.
>
>    Why do you want to make perl of python? If you want perl just go
and use
> perl, no problem.

I wasn't intending to do that. Perl's 'funny characters' solve one
significant problem that comes up every time someone suggests
adding a character syntax word to python: breaking existing code.

The only permanent solution to this problem is to take the character
syntax words from a different space than identifiers. Perl does it
(accidentally, I presume, although I don't know for certain) by
using special characters to mark (some aspects of) the type of
identifiers.
I actually took this idea from Color Forth!

As someone else noted, it would make simplistic editors much
less usable, but many (possibly most) of us use much more
capable editors. In any case, the basic point 1: the source would
be in some variation of Unicode, breaks all simplistic editors that
exist today.

John Roth