PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Torsten Bronger]

Hallöchen!

Laurent Pointal writes:

> [...]
>
> Personnaly, even if the PEP goes (and its accepted), I'll continue
> to use identifiers as currently. [...]

Me too (mostly), although I do like the PEP.  While many people have
pointed out possible issues of the PEP, only few have tried to
estimate its actual impact.  I don't think that it will do harm to
Python code because the programmers will know when it's appropriate
to use it.  The potential trouble is too obvious for being ignored
accidentally.  And in the case of a bad programmer, you have more
serious problems than flawed identifier names, really.

But for private utilities for example, such identifiers are really a
nice thing to have.  The same is true for teaching in some cases.
And the small simulation program in my thesis would have been better
with some α and φ.  At least, the program would be closer to the
equations in the text then.

> [...]
>
> * a possibility to specify for modules that they must *define*
> only ascii-based names, like a from __futur__ import asciionly. To
> be able to enforce this policy in projects which request it.

Please don't.  We're all adults.  If a maintainer is really
concerned about such a thing, he should write a trivial program that
ensures it.  After all, there are some other coding guidelines too
that could be enforced this way but aren't, for good reason.

Tschö,
Torsten.

-- 
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus
                                      Jabber ID: bronger at jabber.org
                      (See http://ime.webhop.org for ICQ, MSN, etc.)