PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Marco Colombo]

On 15 Mag, 15:44, George Sakkis <george.sak... at gmail.com> wrote:
> After 175 replies (and counting), the only thing that is clear is the
> controversy around this PEP. Most people are very strong for or
> against it, with little middle ground in between. I'm not saying that
> every change must meet 100% acceptance, but here there is definitely a
> strong opposition to it. Accepting this PEP would upset lots of people
> as it seems, and it's interesting that quite a few are not even native
> english speakers.
>
> George

I see very few people against this PEP.

Most objections are against:

1) the use of non-English words for indentifiers;
2) embedding non-ASCII characters in source files (PEP263);
3) writing unreadable code (for English-speaking readers).

None of the above is covered by this PEP.

Let's face that identifiers are just a small part of the information
conveyed by a program source. All the rest can *already* be totally
unreadable to an English speaker, or even undisplayable on his
monitor. There's no real reason to force ASCII-only identifiers UNLESS
we also force ASCII-only programs.

I doubt any program containing Chinese comments, with Chinese
characters, (which we allow), Chinese strings (which we allow),
identifiers that are Chinese words, written with ASCII characters,
(which we allow) is made any LESS readable by writing those
identifiers with Chinese characters too. But it *is* more readable to
someone speaking Chinese! For sure it's easier for them to read their
words with their own glyphs instead of being forced to spell them with
a foreign alphabet.

.TM.