[Python-3000] PEP 3131 accepted (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed May 23 09:36:24 CEST 2007

Guido van Rossum writes:

We should probably be conservative; I'm not too hopeful about support for right-to-left alphabets for example.

I don't see what's for Python to support.

My reasoning: bidi is entirely an issue of presentation; all Python should do is prohibit[1] direction markers in identifiers. To the extent that we don't know of editors that can consistently[2] present such identifiers as users would expect to see them, say bidi identifiers should be avoided as a "best current practice".

AFAICS, PEP 3131 is going to work fine if we just delegate all the problems that have been brought up to the development environment in that way, except the important issues that Ka-Ping raises. IMHO the answer you gave is entirely satisfactory.

Footnotes: [1] Or ignore, but I prefer prohibit because the bookkeeping involved in ensuring that introspective output produces the identifier that was read in from a file is unjustifiable overhead, and because permitting them opens the door to "stupid bidi tricks" by authors (we can't do anything about people who let their editors play stupid bidi tricks on them).

[2] Ie, so that different identifiers always look different, and the same identifier is always presented in the same form.

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