Multibyte Character Surport for Python

[François Pinard]

[Chris Liechti]

> i wouldn't allow non ASCII chars. [...] think of someone in a foreign
> country who just does not have those keys on his keyboard.

So, you want to protect people against technical difficulties they might
meet?  It might be better leaving this choice to them.  Using computers
in localised environments require many things, among which keyboards
and displays.  People usually manage.  Admire them.  Help them. :-)

> how many languages must a programmer learn to work on sources if english
> isn't sufficient?

Most of us have a language that we learned at very low age, and which we
progressively mastered while growing up, and which is permanent part of
our lives.  See: I do not have to learn French to write French identifiers.
For most English people, English is sufficient.  What is the problem you see?

> and how many encodings will be allowed?  need i have to a zillion code
> pages on my machine [...]

I think Python has already travelled a good part of that road already.  As a
French speaker and writer, I rarely touches more than two or three encodings.

> [...] i think it will become very nasty if you must write the correct
> encoding in each source file...

Annoying, maybe.  However, this is much, much less nasty than writing
English all over, for people not having a genuine reason or appeal to do so.

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