[Python-3000] Support for PEP 3131 (original) (raw)

Collin Winter collinw at gmail.com
Mon May 14 18:35:14 CEST 2007

On 5/14/07, Jason Orendorff <jason.orendorff at gmail.com> wrote:

On 5/13/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: > I don't think this scenario is all that unlikely. A > program is initially written by a Russian programmer > who uses his own version of "a" as a variable name. > Later an English-speaking programmer makes some > changes, and uses an ascii "a". Now there are two > subtly different variables called "a" in different > parts of the program.

Greg, If this scenario were not unlikely, it would have happened to a Java programmer somewhere, right? Has this ever happened? I wasn't able to find a case.

Well, it's not exactly the kind of thing that makes for a riveting blog post.

This is something the Perl 6 people debated for months on end when deciding whether to support Unicode identifiers. They eventually came to the conclusion that if your editor doesn't flag this kind of thing, it's a bug in the editor. I don't know of any editors that actually do this, but there you go.

Of course, one of the main motivations for including Unicode support in Perl 6 was that they were running out of "meaningful" ASCII punctuation combinations and were looking to things like the »+« operator and the ¥ operator for their salvation. Thankfully Python doesn't have this problem.

Collin Winter

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