PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Eric Brunel]

On Wed, 16 May 2007 15:46:10 +0200, Neil Hodgson  
<nyamatongwe+thunder at gmail.com> wrote:

> Eric Brunel:
>
>> Funny you talk about Japanese, a language I'm a bit familiar with and  
>> for which I actually know some input methods. The thing is, these only  
>> work if you know the transcription to the latin alphabet of the word  
>> you want to type, which closely match its pronunciation. So if you  
>> don't know that 売り場 is pronounced "uriba" for example, you have  
>> absolutely no way of entering the word. Even if you could choose among  
>> a list of characters, are you aware that there are almost 2000 "basic"  
>> Chinese characters used in the Japanese language? And if I'm not  
>> mistaken, there are several tens of thousands characters in the Chinese  
>> language itself. This makes typing them virtually impossible if you  
>> don't know the language and/or have the correct keyboard.
>
>     It is nowhere near that difficult. There are several ways to  
> approach this, including breaking up each character into pieces and  
> looking through the subset of characters that use that piece (the  
> Radical part of the IME). For 売, you can start with the cross with a  
> short bottom stroke (at the top of the character) 士, for 場 look for  
> the crossy thing on the left 土. The middle character is simple looking  
> so probably not Chinese so found it in Hiragana. Another approach is to  
> count strokes (Strokes section of the IME) and look through the  
> characters with that number of strokes. Within lists, the characters are  
> ordered from simplest to more complex so you can get a feel for where to  
> look.

Have you ever tried to enter anything more than 2 or 3 characters like  
that? I did. It just takes ages. Come on: are you really serious about  
entering *identifiers* in a *program* this way?
-- 
python -c "print ''.join([chr(154 - ord(c)) for c in  
'U(17zX(%,5.zmz5(17l8(%,5.Z*(93-965$l7+-'])"