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

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon May 21 23:30:28 CEST 2007

""Martin v. Löwis"" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote in message news:464FFD04.90602 at v.loewis.de... | I'm not aware of an algorithm that | can do transliteration for all Unicode characters.

Were you proposing to allow all Unicode characters in Python names?-)

| Therefore, I cannot add transliteration into the PEP.

Non sequitor. How I read this is "Because I do not know how to do something that does not need to be done, I cannot do something that could be done." So it strikes me as another red-herring dismissal that seems to ignore the actual content of what I proposed, which was to do something that I believe can be done and which would be useful to do.

My proposal was that the Unicode characters allowed in Python identifiers be limited to those with a transliteration, either current or to be developed by those who want to use a particular character set. So if, for instance, one or more people wanted to program in Klingon in its 'native' characters, they would need to provide the mapping (which I suspect already exists). Transliterations more or less official do exist, I believe, for the major languages that we are seriously concerned with. And for just readablity purposes, I would leave the accented latin chars alone, and even let them be available as part of an extended target set. So while I might be wrong, I think that we could get 99% use-case coverage.

While the PEPs acceptance as-is (for which I congratulate you for your persistence) makes transliteration moot as an acceptibility enhancement, it does not change its desireability for use purposes. To repeat: without it, national character identifiers will tend to ghettoize code. While this might be a minor issue for Chinese, it will be a bigger issue for people writing in Thai or Ibo or other languages with small pioneering groups of Python programmers.

Terry Jan Reedy

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