Benefits of unicode identifiers (was: Allow additional separator in identifiers)

[Mikhail V]

On Fri, Nov 24, 2017 at 9:08 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 7:00 AM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I agree that one should have more choices, but
>> people still can't really choose many things.
>> I can't choose hyphen, I can't choose minus sign,
>> and many tech people would probably want more operators.
>> It counts probably not so *big* amount of people, compared to *all*
>> people that potentially would say "oh how wonderful is it to be able
>> to write in various scripts", still it is just a "use it at your own risk"
>> thing at a minimum, and merely based on emotions rather than
>> common sense.
>>
>> Regardless of what Unicode decides for classifications, there simply must
>> be careful analysis how the major *Python* code actually looks in the end
>> of all experiments. Especially true for characters in regard
>> identifiers versus operators.
>
> And it's the "identifiers versus operators" question that is why you
> can't use hyphen in an identifier. Underscore is available as an ASCII
> joiner, and there are various non-ASCII joiners available too. Why is
> hyphen so important?

Yes I understand this, so it is how Unicode defines joiners.
Yeah, debates about the classifications can be
hold forever, but one should not forget about the hyphen during
these debates. Hyphen is used I think more then six hundreds
years as a joiner (or probably some other classification term one prefer).
And just comes so it works very well.
Among Unicode joiners, middledot reminds of hyphen,
but it is not used in typography for this task. So it is not good option
and has issues in most fonts (too small or not aligned with lowercase).
Often it is used to show up whitespace in editors,
so it is kind of 'reserved'.
Other joiners in unicode classification - well probably ok for a 1st April
proposal.

About importance, it was already covered in the proposal.
Why it is SO important? It is rhetorical question.
Important compared to what? Compared to the question, what
one will eat and where sleep tomorrow? Then it is not so important.


Mikhail