[Python-3000] Unicode identifiers (Was: sets in P3K?) (original) (raw)

Georg Brandl g.brandl at gmx.net
Sat Apr 29 15:12:22 CEST 2006

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote:

I was hoping to propose a PEP on non-ASCII identifiers some day; that would (of course) include a requirement that the standard library would always be restricted to ASCII-only identifiers as a style-guide.

IMO communication about code becomes much more cumbersome if there are non-ASCII letters in identifiers, and the rules about what's a letter, what's a digit, and what separates two identifiers become murky. It depends on the language you use to communicate. In English, it is certainly cumbersome to talk about Chinese identifiers. OTOH, I believe it is cumbersome to communicate about English identifiers in Chinese, either, because the speakers might not even know what the natural-language concept behind the identifiers is, and because they can't pronounce the identifier.

They'll still have to type, pronounce and talk about English keywords, English operators and English standard library and 3rd-party module, class and method names, which makes a big percentage of code still Latin.

Georg

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