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

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Wed May 2 07:05:21 CEST 2007

He says "the tools aren't ready yet", which I take to mean that Python won't need to support it until all widely-used editors, email and news software, etc, etc, reliably support displaying and editing of all unicode characters. We're clearly a long way from that situation.

I don't understand that requirement. Clearly, editors do support non-ASCII characters already for many years (atleast since 1980, maybe longer). Is the complaint that a single editor does not support all characters? I don't see a need for that - the editor will present a replacement character. However, if somebody bothered entering the character in a source file, there is actually a high chance that an editor can display it (how else did he enter the character?)

Or is the complaint that editors don't support UTF-8? That is simply not true anymore. E.g. IDLE has supported editing UTF-8 for several Python releases now.

Regards, Martin

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