[Python-3000] pep 3131 again (original) (raw)

tomer filiba tomerfiliba at gmail.com
Thu May 17 03:06:13 CEST 2007

=== RTL/LTR === i pointed out already that no existing editor can handle LTR-RTL representation correctly, which essentially renders all RTL languages out of the scope of this PEP. that doesn't bother me personally so much, as i'm not going to use this feature anyway, but that still leaves us with the "european imposed colonialism" :)

the only practical way to use RTL languages in code is to have an RTL programming language, where "if" is spelled "אם", "for" as "עבור", "in" as "בתוך", and so on, and the entire program is RTL. having code like --

for קקי in פיפי(1,2,3)

is only unreadable by all means (since the parenthesis are LTR, while the name is RTL, etc.)

=== help people who can't type english === since the keywords remain ASCII, along with stdlib and all other major third party libs -- how does that help the english-illiterate programmer?

import random
満は = range(100)
random.shuffle(満は )
未 = 満は.pop(7)
if len(未) > 58:
    print "ラーになる!!!" #  מה זה השטויות האלה בכל מקרה?

apart from excessive visual noise, the amount of latin identifiers and keywords is not negligible. if all you're trying to save is coming up with english names for your functions, than that's okay, but saying "japanese people have a hard time coding in the latin alphabet" does not withstand practical usage.

the solution is an intermediate translator that lies between the programmer and the interpreter. that -- or learning latin (it's only 26 letters :) and transliterating japanese names with latin characters.

all in all, i'm still -1 on that. i would rather go halfway -- allow unicode comments. let people write docs in their native language, that's all fine with me (or is that already imposed by the UTF8 PEP?)

-tomer

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