[Python-3000] PEP: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers (original) (raw)

James Y Knight foom at fuhm.net
Tue May 1 18:58:19 CEST 2007

On May 1, 2007, at 12:19 PM, Jim Jewett wrote:

On 5/1/07, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

The identifier syntax is *. IDStart is defined as all characters having one of the general categories uppercase letters (Lu), lowercase letters (Ll), titlecase letters (Lt), modifier letters (Lm), other letters (Lo), letter numbers (Nl), plus the underscore (XXX what are "stability extensions listed in UAX 31). Are you sure that modifier letters should be included? The standard says so, but as nearly as I can tell, these are really more like diacritics -- and some of them look an awful lot like punctuation. http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U02B0.pdf

The entire point of these characters is that they are to be treated
as letters (that is, can make up part of a word). If they were
punctuation or diacritics, the other very-similar-looking characters
in other parts of the codespace could be used. These letters seem to
be mainly intended for spelling out phonetic pronunciations. It's
unlikely that anyone would want to write an python identifier in IPA,
but that's not a good reason to go against the standard.

James

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