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

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Fri May 25 18:05:07 CEST 2007

"Guido van Rossum" <guido at python.org> wrote:

On 5/24/07, Josiah Carlson <jcarlson at uci.edu> wrote: > Where else in Python have we made the default > behavior only desired or useful to 5% of our users? Where are you getting that statistic? This seems an extremely backwards, US-centric worldview.

Stephen Turnbill's rough statistics on multilingual use in Emacs... """ And that's a big "if". Most of your users will not see code in a language the current version of your editor can't deal with in their working lives, and 90% won't in the usable life of your product. That I can tell you from experience. Emacs has all these wonderful multilingual features, but you know what? 95% of our users are monoscript 100% of the time.[1] 90% of the rest use their primary script 95% of the time. Emacs being multilingual only means that the one language might be Japanese or Thai. If 99% of your users currently use only ISO-8859-15, that isn't going to change by much just because Python now allows Thai identifiers. """ http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2007-May/007887.html

Which I 'poorly extrapolate' to users who write source using non-ascii identifiers... """ Why? Primarily because ascii identifiers are what are allowed today, and have been allowed for 15 years. But there is this secondary data point that Stephen Turnbull brought up; 95% of users (of Emacs) never touch non-ascii code. Poor extrapolation of statistics aside, to make the default be something that does not help 95% of users seems a bit... overenthusiastic. Where else in Python have we made the default behavior only desired or useful to 5% of our users? """ http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2007-May/007927.html

Apples and oranges to be sure, but there are no other statistics that anyone else is able to offer about use of non-ascii identifiers in Java, Javascript, C#, etc.

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