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

Mike Klaas mike.klaas at gmail.com
Wed May 2 21:08:21 CEST 2007

On 5/1/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2006-April/001526.html > > where Guido states that he trusts me that it can be made to work, > and that "eventually" it needs to be supported.

+0

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.

Couldn't the same argument be applied against non-ascii characters in string literals? It would be safest to enforce the use of \u escapes, no?

It is certainly true that the use of non-ascii indentifiers will cause the code to be unusable by someone using some set of tools. This is something that the user will be aware of (as all new users of non-ascii have been in the past). Tools won't change without bug reports.

-Mike

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