[Python-Dev] Re: Allowing non-ASCII identifiers (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon Feb 9 13:55:48 EST 2004

"François Pinard" <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote in message news:20040209162704.GB7467 at titan.progiciels-bpi.ca...

There are two matters here. One is the technical portability, the other is more related to human issues.

I think there are two human issues: language and alphabet (character set) used to transcribe the language.

fear that people would not only comment in German (I'm using German as an example, of course), or use German strings, but also choose identifiers based on German words instead of English words, making programs less easy to read by English people,

This, of course, can be and is being done now as long as one drops euro accents (I know, eleve is probably ugly to you) or transliterates other alphabets to the English subset of latin chars. For instance, if I remember correctly, part of the Python scripting for Blade of Darkness was done by Spanish-speaking programmers using Spanish identifiers and comments. There have also been snippets posted on c.l.p with German and other Euro languange words. But I can potentially read, understand, and even edit such code.

For another example, if I read

for wa in konichi: ... konichi[wa] =

I can recognize that the two occurences each of 'konichi' and 'wa' are the same, and that konichi is dict-like, even if I do not know their English meanings (assuming they are not gibberish). But if they were in Japanese chars, for instance, matching names to names would be much harder.

Having at various times more or less learned, and partly forgotten, how to at least phonetically read words in Cyrillic, Greek, and Devanagari (Sanskrit) characters, I can appreciate that learning Latin chars must also be a chore to those who learned something else as children. But I also know that I do not necessarily wish to learn a dozen more sets, nor would I wish such on everyone else.

Having said this against the proposal, I suspect that a Unicode-identifier version of Python, official or not, is inevitable, especially if, as and when Python spreads beyond the internationalized elite of each country. If so, I would like to see such at least accompanied by transliteration programs (preferably two-way) using the most accepted transliteration scheme for each alphabet.

Terry J. Reedy

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