[Python-Dev] Divorcing str and unicode (no more implicitconversions). (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Wed Oct 26 11:50:01 CEST 2005

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

A few years ago we had a discussion about this on python-dev and agreed to stick with ASCII identifiers for Python. I still think that's the right way to go. I don't think there ever was such an agreement.

You even argued against having non-ASCII identifiers:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002-May/102936.html

and I agree with you on most of the points you make in that posting:

most of the few who did comment, said they'd rather have ASCII identifiers, e.g.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002-May/104050.html

Do you really think that it will help with code readability if programmers are allowed to use native scripts for their identifiers ?

I think this goes beyond just visual aspects of being able to distinguish graphemes:

If you are told to debug a program written by say a Japanese programmer using Japanese identifiers you are going to have a really hard time. Integrating such code into other applications will be even harder, since you'd be forced to use his Japanese class names in your application. This doesn't only introduce problems with being able to enter the Japanese identifiers, it will also cause your application to suddenly contain identifiers in Japanese even though that's not your native script.

I think source code encodings provide an ideal way to have comments written in native scripts - and people use that a lot. However, keeping the program code itself in plain ASCII makes it far more readable and reusable across locales. Something that's important in this globalized world.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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