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I'm writing a source code editor that translates identifiers and keywords on-screen into a different natural language. This tool will do no transformations except at the reversible word level. There is one simple, avoidable case where this results in nonsense in many languages: "is not". I propose allowing "not is" as an acceptable alternative to "is not".


Obviously English syntax has a deep influence on python syntax, and I would never propose deeper syntactical changes for natural-language-compatibility. This is a trivial change, one that is still easily parseable by an English-native mind (and IMO actually makes more sense logically, since it does not invite confusion with the nonsensical "is (not ...)"). The use-cases where you have to grep for "is not" are few, and the "(is not)|(not is)" pattern that would replace it is still pretty simple.