[Python-Dev] i18n identifiers (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Mon Oct 31 19:51:43 CET 2005

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Steve Holden wrote:

Therefore, if such steps are really going to be considered, I would really like to see them introduced in such a way that no breakage occurs for existing users, even the parochial ones who feel they (and their programs) don't need to understand anything but ASCII. It is straight-forward to make this feature completely backwards compatible. Syntactically, it is a pure extension: existing code will continue to work unmodified, and will continue to have the same meaning. With the feature, you will be able to write code that previously produced SyntaxErrors. Semantically, the only potential incompatibility is that you might find Unicode strings in dict. If purely-ASCII identifiers are going to be represented by byte strings (as they are now), no change in meaning for existing code is anticipated. So it is not necessary to make the feature conditional to preserve compatibility.

If people are really all enthusiastic about such a feature, then it should happen in Python3k when the parser is rewritten to work on Unicode natively.

Note that if you start with this now, a single module in your application using Unicode identifiers could potentially break the application: simply by the fact that stack frames, tracebacks and module globals would now contain Unicode.

Any processing done on the identifiers, like e.g. error formatting would then have to deal with Unicode objects (due to the automatic conversion).

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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