[Python-3000] Support for PEP 3131 (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Mon May 14 22:03:10 CEST 2007

"Jason Orendorff" <jason.orendorff at gmail.com> wrote:

On 5/14/07, Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote: > Have you been able to find substantial Java source in which non-ascii > identifiers were used? I have been curious about its prevalence, but > wouldn't even know how to start searching for such code.

No, I haven't. The most substantial use cases (if any) would have to be in closed source code, which is hard to find. [snip] They did tend to use non-English characters freely in comments and (about half the time) in string literals. The Japanese tutorials had no comments at all in the code.

Your findings seem to suggest (but not prove either way) that having unicode strings and comments (that Python already supports) may be sufficient for a majority of use-cases (assuming that people document and comment their code ;). It would be nice to be able to find more examples in Java.

I guess the question is whether the potential for community fragmentation is worth trying to handle a (seemingly much) smaller set of use-cases than is (already arguably sufficiently) handled with ascii identifiers.

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