PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Jarek Zgoda]

Alexander Schmolck napisał(a):

>>> So, please provide feedback, e.g. perhaps by answering these
>>> questions:
>>> - should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? why?
>> No, because "programs must be written for people to read, and only
>> incidentally for machines to execute". Using anything other than "lowest
>> common denominator" (ASCII) will restrict accessibility of code. This is
>> not a literature, that requires qualified translators to get the text
>> from Hindi (or Persian, or Chinese, or Georgian, or...) to Polish.
>>
>> While I can read the code with Hebrew, Russian or Greek names
>> transliterated to ASCII, I would not be able to read such code in native.
> 
> Who or what would force you to? Do you currently have to deal with hebrew,
> russian or greek names transliterated into ASCII? I don't and I suspect this
> whole panic about everyone suddenly having to deal with code written in kanji,
> klingon and hieroglyphs etc. is unfounded -- such code would drastically
> reduce its own "fitness" (much more so than the ASCII-transliterated chinese,
> hebrew and greek code I never seem to come across), so I think the chances
> that it will be thrust upon you (or anyone else in this thread) are minuscule.

I often must read code written by people using some kind of cyrillic
(Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians). "Native" names transliterated to ascii
are usual artifacts and I don't mind it.

> BTW, I'm not sure if you don't underestimate your own intellectual faculties
> if you think couldn't cope with greek or russian characters. On the other hand
> I wonder if you don't overestimate your ability to reasonably deal with code
> written in a completely foreign language, as long as its ASCII -- for anything
> of nontrivial length, surely doing anything with such code would already be
> orders of magnitude harder?

While I don't have problems with some of non-latin character sets, such
as greek and cyrillic (I was attending school in time when learning
Russian was obligatory in Poland and later I learned Greek), there are a
plenty I wouldn't be able to read, such as Hebrew, Arabic or Persian.

-- 
Jarek Zgoda

"We read Knuth so you don't have to."