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

Steve Howell showell30 at yahoo.com
Sat May 26 16:32:56 CEST 2007

--- "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

By the way, this is an example that shows that the recent injection of the word "parochial" is truly pernicious, because it's attached to the wrong set of arguments.

Sorry. I'm one of the folks who has propagated that term, and I didn't mean for the use of the term to have any pernicious side effect. I have the used word in a context that basically has me labelling myself as "parochial," so I obviously I don't the word to carry any baggage.

Please note, it is those pockets of Unicode adoption that are truly parochial, not the ASCII advocates! Those pockets can be early and deep adopters precisely because they are small, homogeneous groups, unconcerned with the world outside.

That's how I see it too. And again, I don't put any baggage with the term "parochial." I accept, and embrace, the possibility that you could have thriving small communities of Python somewhere on the other side of the globe from me, and even though they're writing code with identifiers that I can't read, they may indirectly benefit me to the extent that they eventually contribute back to the community. Or maybe they never benefit me at all, but the world is a better place.

ASCII advocates are obviously self-interested ("IAGNI, so you can't have it, it would cost me extra effort"), but they are not parochial: they know they're going to exchange code with other cultures, they welcome that exchange, and *they do not want it hindered for "frivolous" reasons*.

That describes me perfectly. I am self-interested to the extent that my employers just pay me to write working Python code, so I want the simplicity of ASCII only. My whole team is parochial in regards to the content of the code itself, even though culturally we are very diverse (American-born programmers are the minority).

In the open source world, I have in fact exchanged code with other cultures, I have welcomed the exchange, and I wouldn't want it hindered for frivolous reasons.

[...]

True, "frivolous" is a parochial evaluation of the cultural exchange that use of Unicode identifiers can foster, but that notion of "parochial" is on a different level. IMHO that "cultural exchange" level is highly relevant to the decision to implement Unicode identifiers in some way, but it's the "code exchange" level that is most relevant to the pace of introduction.

Well said.

And that has to consider the balance between faster growth within Unicode-using groups, versus the facilitation of opportunistic[1] exchange among groups using the (admittedly imperfect) lingua franca of ASCII.

Yep.

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