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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sun Apr 30 18:28:30 CEST 2006

On 4/29/06, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Python 2.3.5 (#2, Mar 6 2006, 10:12:24) [GCC 4.0.3 20060304 (prerelease) (Debian 4.0.2-10)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. py> import locale py> locale.setlocale(locale.LCALL, "") 'deDE at euro' py> löwis=1 py> print löwis 1

But a file with "löwis=1" in it causes a syntax error (even if an encoding is specified).

I believe this is a quirk of interactive mode only. Certainly the language spec doesn't intend to allow this.

> I do think that eventually we'll have to support this. But I don't > think Python needs to lead the pack here; I don't think the tools are > ready yet.

Python doesn't really lead here. The C family of languages (C, C++, Java, C#) all have Unicode identifiers, so there is plenty of experience. Primarily, the experience is that the feature isn't used much, because of obstacles I think we can overcome (primarily, that all these languages make the source encoding implementation-defined; we don't, as we put the source encoding into the source file).

I still think it's premature. In any case, it doesn't strike me as something that needs to be synchronized with Py3k -- it could be introduced earlier or later since it introduces no backwards compatibility. Python can respond much more agile here than most other languages.

I can also see this as a Jython or IronPython "language extension" -- after all, if Java and C# support unicode identifiers e.g. for class names, there will be a need to support importing those classes... That way some experience can be gained.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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