[Python-ideas] Visually confusable unicode characters in identifiers (original) (raw)

Oscar Benjamin oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com
Mon Oct 1 22:26:07 CEST 2012

On 1 October 2012 20:33, Mathias Panzenböck <grosser.meister.morti at gmx.net> wrote:

On 10/01/2012 07:48 PM, Georg Brandl wrote:

On 10/01/2012 07:02 PM, Mathias Panzenböck wrote:

On 10/01/2012 06:43 PM, Robert Kern wrote:

On 10/1/12 5:07 PM, Mathias Panzenböck wrote:

I still don't understand why unicode characters are allowed at all in identifier names. Is the reason for this written down somewhere?

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3131/#rationale But the Python keywords and more importantly the documentation is English. Don't you need to be able to speak/write English in order to code Python anyway? And if you keep you code+comments English you can access a much larger developer pool (all developers who speak English should by my hypothesis be a superset of all developers who speak a certain language). Please; the PEP has been discussed quite a lot when it was proposed, and believe me, yours is not an unfamiliar argument :) You're about 5 years late. Georg I didn't want to start a discussion. I just wanted to know why one would implement such a language feature. Guido's answer cleared it up for me, thanks. I can see the purpose in an educational setting (not in production code of anything a little bit bigger).

Non-ascii identifiers have other possible uses. I'll repost the case that started this discussion on python-tutor (attached in case it doesn't display):

''' #!/usr/bin/env python3

-- encoding: utf-8 --

Parameters

α = 1 β = 0.1 γ = 1.5 δ = 0.075

Initial conditions

xₒ = 10 yₒ = 5 Zₒ = xₒ, yₒ

Solution parameters

tₒ = 0 Δt = 0.001 T = 10

Lotka-Volterra derivative

def f(Z, t): x, y = Z ẋ = x * (α - βy) ẏ = -y * (γ - δx) return ẋ, ẏ

Accumulate results from Euler stepper

tᵢ = tₒ Zᵢ = Zₒ Zₜ, t = [], [] while tᵢ <= tₒ + T: Zₜ.append(Zᵢ) t.append(tᵢ) Zᵢ = [Zᵢⱼ+ Δt*Żᵢⱼ for Zᵢⱼ, Żᵢⱼ in zip(Zᵢ, f(Zᵢ, tᵢ))] tᵢ += Δt

Output since I don't have plotting libraries in Python 3

print('t', 'x', 'y') for tᵢ, (xᵢ, yᵢ) in zip(t, Zₜ): print(tᵢ, xᵢ, yᵢ) '''

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