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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sat Oct 29 14:32:22 CEST 2005

Thanks for these data. This mostly reflects my experience with German and French users: some people would like to use non-ASCII identifiers if they could, other argue they never would as a matter of principle. Of course, transliteration is more straight-forward.

FWIW, being French, I don't remember hearing any programmer wish (s)he could use non-ASCII identifiers, in any programming language. But arguably translitteration is very straight-forward (although a bit lossless at times ;-)).

I think typeability and reproduceability should be weighted carefully. It's nice to have the real letter delta instead of "delta", but how do I type it again on my non-Greek keyboard if I want to keep consistent naming in the program?

ASCII is ethnocentric, but it probably can be typed easily with every device in the world.

Also, as a matter of fact, if I type an identifier with an accented letter inside, I would like Python to warn me, because it would be a typing error on my part.

Maybe this should be an option at the beginning of any source file (like encoding currently). Or is this overkill?

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