PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Mon, 14 May 2007 13:30:42 -0300, <rurpy at yahoo.com> escribió:

> Although probably not-sufficient to overcome this built-in
> bias, it would be interesting if some bi-lingual readers would
> raise this issue in some non-english Python discussion
> groups to see if the opposition to this idea is as strong
> there as it is here.

Survey results from a Spanish-speaking group and a local group from  
Argentina:
Yes:	6
No:	3
Total:	9

Comments summary:

- Spanish requires few additional characters in addition to ASCII letters:  
ñáéíóúü, so there is no great need of Unicode identifiers by Spanish  
developers.

- Python can be embedded and extended using libraries - in those cases,  
what matters mostly is the domain specific usage. Letting the final users  
write their scripts/tasklets/etc using domain-specific and  
language-specific names would be a great thing.

- Would be nice if class attribute names could correspond to table column  
names directly; would be nice to use the Pi greek symbol, by example, in  
math formulae.

- Others raised already seen concerns: about source code legibility; being  
unable to type identifiers; risk of keywords being translated; that you  
can't know in advance whether your code will become widely published so  
best to use English identifiers from start.

- Someone proposed using escape sequences of some kind, supported by  
editor plugins, so there is no need to modify the parser.

- Refactoring tools should let you rename foreign identifiers into ASCII  
only.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina