Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[Kragen Sitaker]

Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> writes:
> This one person has had this dubious "pleasure" and loathes the idea
> with a vengeance.  The very *IDEA* of cutting off the huge majority of
> programmers in the world, who don't understand Italian, from being
> able to understand and work with my code, is utterly abhorrent to me.

For any natural language X, it is the case that the huge majority of
people in the world do not understand X.  As the population of
programmers becomes less Americocentric and less educated (that is, as
programming becomes easier and more useful), it is likely to be the
case that the majority of programmers in the world will not understand
English.

It is unfortunate that this state is abhorrent to you, but the current
state of programming --- confined to the elite --- is a greater evil.

> Now THAT is one niche where I'm glad that Italians' tendency to
> esterophily has prevailed -- all languages (Basic variants, etc) who
> perpetrated such horrors have died unmourned deaths.  I may be

I agree that programming language keywords should not be localized;
the notations for iteration, conditionals, math, abstraction,
application, and so forth, should not vary by language.  It is
perfectly acceptable for a person who does not speak English to learn
"if", "for", "except", and so forth, in order to speak Python; the
vocabulary is quite small.  It is no different from American musicians
having to learn "allegro", "D.C. al fine", and "tremolo" --- it simply
doesn't add significantly to the difficulty of the notation.

But variable and function names belong to the programmer and the
program's audience, not the notation, and should be written in the
language that affords these people the most expressive power.