Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[Alex Martelli]

François Pinard wrote:
        ...
> 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,

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.

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
(very mildly) sad that we don't say "calcolatore" any more in Italy,
but "computer", and so on, but if that was the price to pay to kill
the "programmate in italiano" languages, it was well worth paying.

I now work for a Swedish firm and I'm *VERY* happy they fully
agree -- although it's Swedish, the official language of the firm is
English, all programs and docs &c.  It's bad enough battling with
Swedish keyboards, documents (in Swedish) coming from outside
the firm, etc; at least with code and docs I'm OK!-)

I'm a citizen of the EU.  How many different natural languages
should I learn to actually exercise my right to work anywhere in
the EU, if English (or ANY other SINGLE language) wasn't a de
facto standard?  Let's see: Portuguese; at least four languages
for Spain (castillano, catalano, gallego, Euskadi -- what more?);
French; Flemish; Dutch; German; Italian; Irish; Welsh; Scot; Danish;
Swedish; Finnish.  Hope I've covered them all (until Corsica,
Sardinia, etc, gain more linguistic status than they have now... or
until another 10 or so languages get added by EU's expansion...).

That's not how I want to spend my life.  Long live a world where
ONE natural language (don't care which one: ONE, I can learn)
opens to me the doors of the (programming) world.


Alex