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

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri May 25 14:53:10 CEST 2007

Guido van Rossum writes:

If there's a security argument to be made for restricting the alphabet used by code contributions (even by co-workers at the same company), I don't see why ASCII-only projects should have it easier than projects in other cultures.

(1) Because all projects are currently ASCII-only. I don't hear any complaints from projects currently using non-ASCII identifiers, and there will be few for many months. The scaling argument gets a similar response. I.e., "it won't hurt (not much nor soon)". N.B. Consistent with my Emacs Lisp experience. What is Common Lisp and/or Java experience?

I recall Alex Martelli's discussion of even allowing non-English comments during PEP 263. Many shops will resist non-ASCII identifiers in published or purchased modules, even in the European community, I would think. Jamie Zawinski has an amusing anecdote about the great profanity purge at Netscape; I bet that kind of boss would not be at all happy about the idea of swear words he can't read.

The only thing that really worries me here is Martin's "people will try it and think it's unimplemented" argument (avoidably delaying diffusion of -U unicode), but I think a

SyntaxError: 'non-ASCII identifier: invalid unless enabled with the -U option'

would alleviate that.

(2) Because due to the scaling argument and reduction of fear of the unknown, as well as development of the collateral tools, changing the default from 'ascii' to 'unicode' will be very natural within a few years.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that it's even more natural to make the default unicode now (ie, for the release of Python 3 which is still well in the future) and let the conservatives use '-U ascii', but (a) we have no experience with such a Python, and (b) we don't have any of the tools yet, and I don't see why we would trust them to do a good job without the experience. At least for the "lookalike glyphs" issue the devil is very much in the details. Trial and error stuff, to some extent.

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