PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Michael Torrie]

On Sun, 2007-05-13 at 21:01 +0200, Stefan Behnel wrote:

> For example, I could write
> 
>   def zieheDreiAbVon(wert):
>       return zieheAb(wert, 3)
> 
> and most people on earth would not have a clue what this is good for. However,
> someone who is fluent enough in German could guess from the names what this does.
> 
> I do not think non-ASCII characters make this 'problem' any worse. So I must
> ask people to restrict their comments to the actual problem that this PEP is
> trying to solve.

I think non-ASCII characters makes the problem far far worse.  While I
may not understand what the function is by it's name in your example,
allowing non-ASCII characters makes it works by forcing all would-be
code readers have to have all kinds of necessary fonts just to view the
source code.  Things like reporting exceptions too.  At least in your
example I know the exception occurred in zieheDreiAbVon.  But if that
identifier is some UTF-8 string, how do I go about finding it in my text
editor, or even reporting the message to the developers?  I don't happen
to have that particular keymap installed in my linux system, so I can't
even type the letters!

So given that people can already transliterate their language for use as
identifiers, I think avoiding non-ASCII character sets is a good idea.
ASCII is simply the lowest denominator and is support by *all*
configurations and locales on all developers' systems.

> 
> Stefan